Students agree topics that interest them and then research the information themselves, with the teacher's assistance. Some projects are big, others small. They might involve interviewing people, or looking things up in books or in reference CD-ROMs. An increasingly common activity is to set up small projects involving researching information on the Web. In groups, get them to decide a shopping list, and agree a budget.
Students visit the shopping sites on the Web and fill in their worksheets.
They re-tell where they went, what they bought, and what they couldn't buy. A homework activity could be to write up the shopping trip as if it had really happened. It is simple for the teacher to set up. Activities such as these are mushrooming wherever CD-ROM and Internet facilities are available. Or the teacher might set up email projects with classes of similar ages and interests in different parts of the world.