1) Designing the Perfect Bedroom by M.J. Natalie, Bunker Hill Community College

After learning the names of the different rooms in a house, the furniture and accouterments, I asked students to design their "perfect" bedroom. I wanted my students to experience a sense of ownership and privacy, at least in their imaginations, since many of them share their living space with others. I thought if they could imagine what they wanted in their bedroom, they could begin to imagine what they wanted for their homes. Students enjoyed the drawing activity and the chance to use their imaginations and be creative in class.
 
 

2) Dream Houses: Writing, Cutting & Pasting by Nancy Coffey, Operation Bootstrap

Following housing vocabulary activities, students wrote about their dream houses as a homework assignment. And for the following class, I brought in copies of a real estate magazine called Homes of New England that I had picked up at the local supermarket. Although the houses were located all over New England, only a few were affordable. However, the enticing color photos did provide a jumping off point for students to think about their dream houses.

First we browsed through the magazines to find our individual dream houses. Students cut out their pictures and pasted them on lined paper for a homework project in which they were to describe the houses they had chosen and explain why they had chosen them. At the beginning of the next class I hung up the homework pictures and descriptions and asked students to match their classmates to their dream houses.

For a final product, we used pictures from the magazine to make our own picture dictionaries of various house styles -- Victorians, Colonials, Town Houses, etc.
 
 

3) Building Vocabulary by Shelly Rieman, El Centro del Cardenal

Students learned the vocabulary related to single homes styles, other types of housing, exteriors and special housing features. Currently, all students live in apartments in Boston, and were familiar with the vocabulary associated with duplexes, three-family units and single families. They were unfamiliar with the differences between condominiums, townhouses and cooperatives. When the time came for describing their dream house, most students chose a one-floor single family of modern construction. Nobody was interested in having a fireplace. Everybody wanted a pool, air-conditioning, and a nice yard. For the students who wanted to own a home in the U.S., their dream house was exclusively a single-family, though given the reality of their work and living conditions, all the students could imagine buying a duplex or three-family.
 
 

4) Realistic Dreaming by Ashley Dumas, Project Hope

Earlier, I had taken a stack of free real-estate magazines from a rack in a grocery store. Now, in class, I handed one to each of my students. We spent a while reading the ads and deciphering the abbreviations together. Then, I gave them certain housing criteria (e.g., style, budget, location, number of rooms) and had them flip through the magazines to find houses that closely fit the requirements. Everyone had great fun with this exercise. They especially liked picking out their dream houses, discussing the inflated cost of housing (as compared to prices in their native countries or to prices in this country just ten years ago), and thinking about truth in advertising.