Why does helium make your voice sound funny?

Advanced lesson plan (B2 and above): Why does helium make your voice sound funny? - BUY ME A COFFEE if you like my FREE ESL content

Sucking in a lungful of helium has hilarious effects, making even the gruffest baritone sound like Daffy Duck. But have you ever stopped to wonder why this gas affects our voice? And given that helium is a non-renewable resource used in space rockets, quantum computers and MRI scans, should we really be doing silly party tricks with it at all?

In this B2+ worksheet, students will 

• Study a video about helium's effect on the voice
• Learn six voice-related idioms
• Discuss six phrasal verbs based on BLOW (to BLOW up, to BLOW away, to BLOW off, etc.)
• See advanced adjectives to describe balloons
• Read and answer questions about an article on the scarcity of helium
• Turn adjectives into their comparative form while completing sentences related to balloons

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Click HERE for the worksheet answers

1) To match six pictures with BLOW-related phrasal verbs (to blow away, to blow up, to blow out, to blow off, to blow through)

2) To find three adjectives from a list of advanced vocabulary that do NOT describe balloons

3) To put adjectives into their comparative forms to complete sentences related to balloons

4) To practise listening comprehension by studying a video about how helium affects the voice

5) To expand the students' repertoire of idioms/phrases, matching six voice-related idioms/phrases with their definitions (to love the sound of one's own voice, to make one's voice heard, to raise one's voice, the voice of an angel, a lone voice in the wilderness, indoor voices, please!)

6) To improve reading comprehension by studying a short article about the scarcity of helium, a non-renewable resource used in many high-tech fields.