I was asked to make a lesson plan for an SHS 3rd grade class in Practical English, so I decided to theme it around going to an art gallery and making your own guide/guiding other people around the gallery. This involved a lot of cutting out of pictures of famous paintings and cards with their descriptions on them. The class is only 9 students, so I split the class into two teams and gave them one set of paintings, descriptions and artist descriptions each.
First, the students have to match a set of famous paintings (Mona Lisa, The Persistence of Memory etc.) to their titles and descriptions in English. For example, the description for "Nighthawks" by Edward Hopper is "Three people are drinking at a bar. There is also a man serving drinks. The bar is bright, and outside, it is dark." You could edit these descriptions to be more vague or harder to understand for high ability students.
After they match the paintings to their titles and descriptions, they have to match the paintings to their artists by reading cards with the names of the artists and a description of their works on them. For example, the description for Edward Hopper begins as follows: "An American painter who became famous in the 1920s. He often painted people in settings such as restaurants, houses, and other modern buildings." This activity usual takes more time because the clues are not as obvious. You can make it a competition between the groups to see who can match them correctly the fastest. If one group matches them all but is wrong, the other group can still win.
After they've successfully matched the paintings to their artists, they are given a set of maps for the art gallery with numbers on them corresponding to the paintings. They can place the actual paintings on the maps to make it easier for the next activity. Here, they are given statements by three visitors to the gallery, John, Gus, and Ed. Each of the visitors tells them specific paintings they want to see and how many minutes they can spend in the gallery. The students must read the statements and look at the routes on each floor (A, B and C) and choose which routes are best for each visitor.
Lastly, there is a "fill in the blanks" worksheet for a dialogue between a customer and the receptionist at the art gallery. It's pretty straightforward and usually takes the least amount of time, so I save it for the end.
There is an additional activity that involves giving directions to John, Gus and Ed to specific paintings in the gallery. The students must read the example dialogue betweeen the "Gallery Guide" and the customer and follow the template to make their own directions. I did this in a separate lesson but it could also be incorporated into the first set of activities if there is time left. I put the maps on a screen using a PowerPoint and ask a volunteer to show the directions on the maps.
You could choose less famous paintings or paintings that all look similar to make the first matching activity harder. The second matching activity usually takes more time and thought to get all of them correct.
I did this with a class of 4 students and it went great.
I ended up using a PowerPoint rather than laminating cards which seemed to work okay.