When Charlie and Suzzane were #Homeschooling I always like to think outside the box we would use television shows and movies. One of my favorite shows was #Friends. I received the complete Friends The Complete Series DVD set which we will be watching this week.
If Charlie hadn’t graduated we would have used the DVD’s in our Classes this week. But we’ve finished school but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn something new every week and that is why I’ve created this Lesson Plan you can use in your classroom as well.
Remind your friends and family using Friends as a teaching tool i a brilliant way to make learning fun and culturally rich! Here are some lesson plan ideas and resources that use the show Friends to teach English and communication skills:
Lesson Plan Ideas Using Friends
1. Vocabulary & Idioms
- Focus on common expressions and slang used in episodes of Friends including Smelly Cat.
- Example: Look up famous quotes from the TV Show friends including “We were on a break!” → and discuss idiomatic meaning and context.
2. Listening Comprehension
- Play short clips from the show Friends and ask students to answer questions based on dialogue from the show.
- Practice identifying tone, sarcasm, and humor you hear each of the Actors portray and practice talking like them.
3. Grammar in Context
- Use scenes to highlight verb tenses, modals, or reported speech.
- Example: Ross’s storytelling can be a great intro to past perfect tense.
4. Cultural Discussion
- Explore American customs, holidays, and social norms.
- Compare with students’ own cultures for a cross-cultural dialogue.
5. Role Play & Speaking Practice
- Reenact scenes or improvise new endings. including our favorite scene with the Turkey on Monica’s head.
- These are great for fluency, pronunciation, and confidence building.
Ready-Made Resources
- ESL Printables – Friends Worksheets offers dozens of episode-specific worksheets for grammar, vocabulary, and speaking practice.
- ESL Video Lessons – Friends Season 1 includes listening practice, slowed-down vocabulary videos, and quizzes.
- Teachers Pay Teachers – Episode 1 Lesson Plan features a free worksheet with 10 tasks including grammar, translation, and speaking activities.
Read F is for Friends: An Alphabet Book (Funko Pop!) (Little Golden Book) or Life is Better with Friends (Official Friends Picture Book). For Art Class use The Official Friends Coloring Book: The One with 100 Images to Color!
Snacks are always fun to have when watching Friends The Complete Series so why not check out Friends: The Official Cookbook and make snacks, including,” Phoebe’s Grandmother’s Cookies you would have seen on the show.
If you tell me the age group or skill level you’re teaching, I can tailor a lesson plan just for you. Want to dive into a specific episode or theme?
About: Friends: The Complete Series
Friends: The Complete Series is presented via a 1.78:1 1080p/AVC-encoded video transfer; one created by going back to the original 35mm film elements and remastering each season from the ground up. The results, though, vary rather dramatically and give way to a host of minor but, when heaped one atop another, compounding issues.
First, let’s deal with the original 35mm negatives and the series’ original photography. Softness abounds, grain can be unwieldy, and detail is only as revealing as the episodes allow. Friends is classic catalog television, pure and simple. Even in the mid-to-late ’90s, the thought of high definition TVs, much less one in every family room, was something of a pipe dream; certainly nothing executive producers felt the need to account for when it came to squeezing the most out of their budgets.
Like most shows, it was shot for 1.33:1 standard definition mass consumption and DVD-level scrutiny, nothing more. (“The Pilot” is an even bigger mess. Don’t panic.) Remaster or no, Warner Bros. can’t turn water into wine, and I have no intention of docking the presentation for its inherited shortcomings. Other more disconcerting problems arise as the series progresses, the worst of which plague the third, fourth and fifth seasons.
The majority of these problems could have been addressed with some tweaking, especially since, as it stands, “tweaking” is exactly what caused them to manifest in the first place. Over the course of the show’s ten seasons, color and contrast run the gamut (from pleasant and natural to dull and yellowed, to bright and vivid, to overbearing, then steadily back to natural), fleshtones are sometimes muddy or over-saturated, primaries are problematic early on and too vibrant on occasion as the series nears its end, crush hinders shadow detail as black levels bottom out, and intermittent compression artifacts, faint and fleeting as they are, pop up every now and again.
Obvious noise reduction is also in play. There are scenes and entire episodes where it’s applied with such an uncharacteristically heavy hand that it wreaks havoc on midrange shots and numerous closeups. Other digital techniques have been used to normalize and stabilize aspects of the series’ 236-episode photography too; just none that lead to nearly as many mishaps.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
