Activities for all levels

General

• Questions to ask yourself often:

  • What are my objectives? (for this class, for this lesson, for this activity?)

  • What does it mean to "know" something?

  • What sub-skills do my students need to be able to do that?

  • What add-on challenge can I give to students who finish quickly?

• A continuum of activity ideas, from "supported use" to "independent use" of a new skill - see details here

• Grouping - Ways to put students into groups

Great sources

• Games to Learn English (simple interactive games, mostly for lower levels, though teachers can also create their own!)

• ESLGames.com (many kinds of games designed for adult learners)

• Engoo.com lesson materials

• ESL Brains (there are free lesson plans as well as paid)

• Using videos - See the Video Review Template and Teaching with Videos Ideas - both from ELT Buzz 

Vocabulary development activities

• Dominoes (in-person) - great for reinforcing vocabulary or anything visual. Teach how to use them by having everyone crowd around one desk or drawing big ones on the board. 

  • Domino maker and pre-made dominoes

• Scrabble letters (in-person) - Promotes spelling, familiarity with words & letters, creativity, student choice. Draw an example on the board showing how to link words (if that's what you want). Students can spell words from the lesson, spell sentences, spell dictated words, etc.

• Grocery fliers (in-person or online) - from your junk mail or just search "grocery sale fliers"! Teach prices (how do we say, $5.99?), abbreviations (lb, ea, BOGO, limit 2, sale, etc.), product names, questions (how much is ...? That's expensive! cheap vs inexpensive ...)

• Bus schedules (in-person or online) - Great for teaching time words, early, earlier, late, first, last, corner, SW/SE/NW/NE, etc. Take photos at bus stops, stop by a Trimet office, https://trimet.org/bus/ 

Structured practice activities

• Student interview grids - have your students interview one another. Then do a "report out" by asking questions or getting them to put the results on the board and discussing them. Can use to teach comparative language, questions, or pretty much anything you want to put into the grids. 

  • Example #1 - with sample dialogue, example #2 (3 per page)

• Free on-line games & game makers 

  • Jeopardy Labs - easy to create your own, use/edit someone else's

  • LearnHip.com - ready-made games & game makers targeted for language learning

  • www.eslgamesplus.com/ 

  • www.eslgamesworld.com/

• In-person games - 

  • Templates to make your own board games, Aided way to create your own board games (an example: adverbs of frequency)

  • Monopoly Junior - teach money language, game playing language (your turn, my turn), simple reading

• In-person techniques

  • Cut-aparts: Take a text (story, dialogue, anything). Make copies (on card stock if you can), & cut apart the different sentences. Students have to recreate the text and then practice it. Could invest in several pair of scissors and have students do the cutting. 

  • Structured conversation - some options. If you have a big class, think about the noise factor when you decide on your structure

  • Running dictation - great description here

• Comic strips with blank bubbles - samples

Fluency development activities

• Picture differences - pair up the students. Give each person a different image - they cannot show their image to their partner. They have to find the differences by describing what they see. If you Google "picture differences," you'll find a ton. Of course use simpler images for lower level students. (This is more difficult but can be orchestrated for online class with a bit of planning. You would sending different images to different students and then pair them in breakout rooms.)

• Sequence stories - so many ways to do this, depending on the students' levels & your lesson objectives 

  • Use commonly known stories like fairy tales, or cartoon strips, or sequences of daily activity (from something like Action English Pictures, Sequences: Picture Stories for ESL, or Picture Stories)

  • Depending on the complexity of the story and the level of the class, students can:

    • Work together to put them in order then tell the story

    • Listen to you telling the story and respond by putting them in order (with big copies taped to the board or working in pairs)

    • Each take a square or two and hide it from the others. Everyone describes their square(s) without showing it. Students have to decide the order of the squares without looking. Then they turn them over and fix (if needed), then tell the story.

• Personal biography (possibly creating a class storybook). This can be done at every level and can be really empowering for students. Think carefully about what you expect students to write about and what skills they need to do so. 

  • Write your own story using the language that you have taught them. Read it with them, get them to read it with a partner. You can also make it into cut-aparts and have them recreate it.

  • It's good to also give them a template to write with (depending on their level).