Everyone has their favorite activities in the ESL classroom (hangman, a game, perhaps a toy doll), but we have found that we reach for one toy over and over for many different ages and purposes: the ABC foam blocks. These are the kind that we use:
Chenille Kraft WonderFoam Learning Blocks, available on Amazon.com
These blocks can be used from ages 1-10 (and probably older!). Here are a few ways to incorporate these activities into your lesson:
Very Young Learners:
Name the colors
Count the blocks
Build a tower (4 blocks per student) and then make them count to 5 before knocking it down
Do different actions with your blocks: put them on your shoulder, on your hand, on your foot, on your leg, on your tummy, on your head. Count to three and then tip your head so that the block falls on the floor (a big hit!).
Read the numbers
Race to the end of a room to get a specific color out of the pile of blocks (great for when your students are so hyper that your lesson plan is sinking!)
Young primary students:
Group the colors, numbers, letters, etc.
Identify the pictures (show them quickly so it’s not so easy!)
Guess the color (number, etc.) with your eyes closed
Build a big tower, letting each student add one block, until it falls down. The student to place the last block is out!
Play hangman with the pictures on the block.
Older primary students:
Write one of the words on the blackboard from the blocks and have the group give the student that is “it” hints to guess the word. Obviously, the student that is “it” can’t look at the blackboard and the group can’t say the word on the blackboard.
Hide the blocks around the room and have them write prepositional statements about where they find the blocks (“The block is between the book and the pen.”)
Use them as conversation starters (“This block has a penguin. Penguins are animals that live in cold terrain. They eat…”)
As you can see, if we could only invest in one teaching toy, it would definitely be this one! What’s your favorite teaching toy? Leave us a comment and let us know!
One of the keys to keeping very young learners (ages 2-5) interested and involved in the class is to switch games or topics frequently. An activity can be anywhere from 1-5 minutes; more than that and the students simply don’t have the attention span to stay connected to the material. Particularly for young students, it’s important to use English in a natural way rather than attempting to “teach” vocabulary and grammar out of context. That’s why playing with things that don’t seem very much like a serious English lesson is often so effective at helping young learners speak more English!
We are always trying to come up with new activities that can be fun for young learners and don’t require a lot of set-up or tear-down. The longer we spend preparing an activity, the less time that our students are getting active language practice, and the more likely they are to become distracted (although you can read about some passive teaching techniques here!). We need things that work quickly and are fun!
We have been trying out a new upcycled pasta shaker and have found that it’s lots of fun! It’s also a great way to practice numbers, colors, the “stop” and “wait” commands, and to turn nervous energy into a positive learning experience!
Pasta shakers require very few things that you probably have around your house or school:
a clean, dry plastic bottle with a lid
something that children can touch and count to fill the bottle
Here’s how we play pasta shakers:
Show the students your plastic bottle. Ask what it is. Ask them if it’s an apple or a banana (no!). Tell them that it’s a bottle! What can we drink out of a bottle? Milk or water!
Tell the students to listen (shhhhh, listen! in a quiet voice). Shake the bottle. They won’t hear anything. Look disappointed and even be a little silly with your bottle trying to make a noise.
Bring out a small box with 10 pieces of pasta (You can repeat this activity with other fillers, like marbles, clean rocks or colored pasta. Make sure that it is an age-appropriate filler and that, should a student get it in his or her mouth, there is minimal choking risk!). Show the students and say Wow, pasta! We can shake the pasta!
Count each piece of pasta as you drop them into the bottle. The students should count with you. Shake the bottle and tell them, Look! We’ve made a pasta shaker!
Ask the students if they would like to make a pasta shaker. You can use “Yes, please” for very young learners, or “Can I make a pasta shaker?” for older learners.
Hand out the bottles to the students. Give 10 fillers to the students one-by-one and help them count as they put the fillers in the bottle.
Let them shake! You can invent songs, dances, etc., to make this even more fun!
You can expand later by telling students when to stop shaking (and count to a certain number before resuming their shaking!). This will help them learn to focus on you and wait for their reward.
Happy New Year! We hope that everyone had a great holiday and is back to school and geared up for more fun learning!
We are starting a unit on family members with a group of students ages 3-5, so we wanted to share a few activities with you featuring one of our favorite ESL cartoons, Peppa Pig!
We will start out the unit with learning the names of the family members. We prefer the traditional “Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Grandma, Grandpa” rather than teaching them the names of Peppa Pig’s family (Mummy, Daddy, Granny, Grandpa, etc.) You can explain that there are different names for family members if you wish, but we like to keep things simple at this age.
Here are some great Peppa Pig family flashcards thanks to ISL Collective:
At this point, it would be great to watch clips from an episode of Peppa Pig in English, pausing the video and asking “Who is this?” for different members of the family.
To get students to begin recognizing the family members and tracing the words, use this fun coloring worksheet:
Once you’ve reviewed the family members and started tracing the names, your students are ready for a bit of production! Use this simple worksheet to match the name of the family members to the pictures and then trace the words.
Gearing up for a new school year often means lots and lots of lesson planning, professional development courses and shopping for teaching supplies. In the US, many schools started last week or this week, but in Spain, August equals vacation, and schools won’t begin until at least September 1.
Of course, that means that teachers are already thinking about the next school year! Today, we thought that we’d share nine of our favorite new teaching supplies for young learners and a few activities that you can do with them! They are our favorites because they so versatile that you can get hundreds of activities out of these 9 toys.
Nine of our favorite new teaching supplies for 2014-2015!
Let’s start with a description of each product from left to right (top to bottom), where you can buy it, and prices:
Ikea Titta Djur Finger Puppets – This set of 10 animal puppets was found at Ikea for 4.99€. I’ve used these with toddlers before, and they are amazingly durable!
Rainbow Mini Soft Plastic Animals – This tube of 8 rainbow animal puppets was purchased at Dideco for 8.21€ after teacher’s discount (about 1€ per animal).
Portable or Mountable 40x60cm Magnetic Whiteboard – Purchased at Didecofor the amazing price of 6.26€ after teacher’s discount. This is perfectly transportable for those of us who teach on the go! Also available in 60x90cm for about 12€.
Learning Resources Farmers Market Color Sorting Set – This amazing and versatile set of toys and buckets was purchased on Amazon.com for $22.99. This item will ship to Madrid, and though it’s one of more expensive investments of the year, it’s awesome!
Julia Doll – This 23cm tall little blonde was found at Dideco for 12.60€ after teacher’s discount.
Animal Sponges for Painting – Also from Dideco, this set of 10 sponges was a steal for 4.87€. They also have modes of transportation and other common objects!
Fabler Björn Teddy Bear – At the steal price of 0.99€ per teddy, our budget stretched to allow each of our seven very young learners (2-3 year old class level) to have their own “baby” for class activities. They fit into Ikea’s small Kassett boxes (2/2.99€), which means that they can be a surprise for every class!
Now what can we do with these toys (ahem, teaching supplies) that make them amazing for ESL young learners?
For example, the Farmers Market Color Sorting Set has so many functions that it makes the steep price tag worth it. With very good reviews and made of quality materials, this set will last a long time with a bit of care. You can wipe down the fruits and baskets with baby wipes without worrying about the color running (like it would with other cheaper sets and wooden food sets). With your very young learners (2-3), you can:
Count the number of each color fruit or veg that you see to practice numbers.
Play the game the intended way and sort each piece by color. Hide the pieces around your learning environment, and this will be even more fun!
Begin to introduce basic foods. The size of these pieces means that you can mime “eating” your favorite fruit or veggie and let children do the same (“Would you like an apple?” “Yes, please.” / “An apple, please.”)
Introduce like and dislike with foods. The following really funny video is easy for very young learners to learn and understand, and you can use the foods included in this set to make up your own funny combinations!
Set up a “play market,” where students can shop – with recycled ecological bags – for their own meals. You can give them fake money, but be careful of small plastic parts!
Play toss and catch with a piece of fruit. The student that catches it must say the name in order to continue throwing. If they get it wrong, they go in the middle of the circle until another student makes a mistake!
Use the fruit and veggies as realia to accompany learning songs, like this one:
As you can see, there are so many possibilities from one object!
For older young learners (5-7 years old), you can do even more activities because of their increased memory skills. For example, combine the fruits with the magnetic whiteboard and the magnetic letters, and give a student a piece of fruit or veg and let them spell it out for the class!
You can really maximize your minimal (or non-existent) teaching supplies budget by choosing products that have more than one use in the classroom.
Let’s take a look at one more of my favorite products: the Ikea Toy Bath Set. Very young learners are learning all about hygiene in their own homes, so this is a chance to capitalize on knowledge that they already have! With this one toy, you can:
Pretend to bathe Julia, baby Teddy, or any other toy that you have in the classroom. Students with good behavior can bring in their favorite doll to get a bath! This allows you to review vocabulary related to the bath in the classroom, even the rubber ducky and shampoo! Let’s expand on that idea with a favorite song:
You can emphasize that some dolls are big, big and others are babies by how they sit down, stand up, and lie down in the bath!
You can practice washing body parts with a set of sponges. If you put Teddy and a bath sponge (very cheap investment at Dollar Stores or Bazaars) in a small box and give one to each student, they get a fun surprise inside the box and they can copy your example with a bigger doll in the bathtub. Let them wash (“wash, wash, wash hands, hands, hands”) hands, face, tummy, legs, arms, etc. This can go a long way when you are teaching basic face and body parts!
You can practice wet and dry! Put a plastic bin inside the bathtub – the bathtub is not waterproof – and let students bathe the Rainbow Soft Plastic Mini Animals. Then dry them with a towel. Practice the words “wet, wet” and “dry, dry.”
Read any children’s story about taking a bath (here are a few examples) and pretend that Teddy is afraid to take a bath. Help him over his fear and get him to enjoy the bath! Let your students follow your example.
As you can see, the trick to having a diverse and fun ESL class with young learners doesn’t depend on how many toys you have in your bag, but how many different ways you can incorporate familiar toys into the class routine. By keeping things fun and exciting, you and your students will love toys that they’ve seen countless times!
Now it’s your turn: what activity would you do with one of the above toys? Leave us a comment!
During an ESL class, we want as much active learning time as possible! Repeating vocabulary with flashcards, role plays to practice a new theme, communicative information gaps, all of these activities and many more are what make up the meat and potatoes of our class time.
But did you know that students can still learn even when they aren’t actively engaged with the teacher? Everyday moments in the classroom that aren’t part of “active teaching” can be effective at helping your young learners gain more contact with speaking and understanding English.
Think about these moments when the class is not engaged with the teacher:
Before the class begins, particularly in class situations where the students or teacher change classrooms and have to prepare for the lesson
If the teacher needs to work one-on-one with a student who has a particular difficulty and the other students are engaged in completing an activity
When students are completing a cut-out, a coloring activity, a self-test at the end of a chapter, or a worksheet on their own for practice (5 year olds already do all of these alone in Spain.)
If an emergency occurs and the teacher must leave the classroom momentarily to get help or to help another teacher or student
When the class is wrapping up
While these aren’t ideal situations, they occur everyday in the classroom, and they take away time from the student’s direct engagement with the teacher. But by using passive teaching techniques, we can keep the students involved with the target language!
These passive moments don’t mean that students have to lose contact with the target language! Image Copyright The Guardian
A passive learning technique is any tool that the teacher uses to expose the students to English when he or she is not directly in front of them, commanding the attention of the class and interacting directly with the class.
Let’s take the example above, when students are waiting for the class to begin. In our school, teacher must switch classrooms every hour (and every 45 minutes in the afternoon) beginning in first grade of primary, and the students must sit for about 5 minutes while the teacher moves and prepares for the next class. Well, it doesn’t take much (a forgotten book, a crying child, a bathroom emergency) for those 5 minutes to turn into 10 minutes, and then you’ve lost a portion of your time to expose students to English. What passive learning techniques can we use to avoid that loss?
One of my favorite passive learning techniques is the mini-teacher system. The mini-teacher is responsible for controlling the behavior of the students while the teacher is absent from the class. The mini-teachers are chosen randomly each week, and if a student needs to say something while the teacher is away, he or she must raise his/her hand until the mini-teacher says that s/he can speak. This interaction should be done in English (and the questions that they ask are part of everyday English vocabulary: “Can I go to the toilet?” “May I drink water?” “What class is next?”, etc). If you begin this tradition at the start of the year, by the end of the year, you will walk into well-controlled classrooms that are already getting into the “English mode.”
Have each student decorate their hand print at the beginning of the year, put a bit of velcro on the back, and shuffle them in a box to “pick” the mini-teacher fairly each week. Display their handprint in the classroom so that everyone knows who is the mini teacher! Image Copyright theneighborhoodmoms.com
Another one of my favorite passive learning techniques is the calendar. The calendar manager is also chosen each week and is responsible for updating the calendar at the beginning of each English class. If you invest in an awesome calendar like the following, your calendar manager can do lots of activities that the class – after a week or two of practice – will be able to complete quickly and in English:
Picture Copyright learningenglish-esl.blogspot.com I have seen similar calendars in English and French at Dideco in Spain!
What can your calendar manager do each day?
Days of the week – The calendar manager leads the classroom in a choral recitation of the days of the week and then puts the proper day on the calendar.
You can expand on this by asking “What day was yesterday?” and “What day will tomorrow be?” when students get used to this step!
Months of the year – The same as Days of the week, but with months of the year
What’s the weather like today? – The calendar manager asks “What’s the weather like?” and students raise their hands to answer. The calendar manager chooses a volunteer and puts up the proper picture on the calendar
What year is it? – It seems overly simple, but this really helps students get used to how we say the years in English!
Is today a special day? – This gives students the opportunity to tell the class something important about their lives, like “It’s my birthday!”, “It’s Halloween!”, or “I have a new baby sister!” There’s nothing that primary students love more than to talk about their own lives, so you might have to cut off this activity!
Another great passive learning technique is using background music in the classroom. We are huge fans of using multimedia in the classroom, and this is a great way for students to sing along to familiar and new songs when they are engaged in individual activities, like coloring, cut-outs, tidying up, etc. You can bring a USB with great songs ready to go and put it on when students are working individually, or if you need to give special attention to one or two students for a few moments.
And lastly, for those moments when the lesson is finishing up and it’s time to go home, try singing a song as a class during those last few moments. This will also help with your classroom routine, sending the signal to students that it’s time for the class to end. I love this one by The Learning Station:
If you have more than a few moments (say, 10 minutes), but you don’t want to start the next lesson and are allowing the students free play time, try to encourage them to play in English. You can do this by:
providing puzzles or play dough (plasticine) and ask them to make something that you’ve spoken about in the lesson and show their friends
keeping an English library in the classroom where students can look at or read books in English
letting students play with a selection of English board games. I love the Orchard Toys games in English for primary students, but they love them more!
Orchard Toys games are awesome! They’re available at Dideco – with a 20% teacher’s discount! – in Spain.
So the next time that you are thinking about “wasted” class time, think of a passive learning technique that will expose students to English for those moments when they aren’t actively involved in a lesson. What passive learning techniques work well for you? Share them with us in a comment!
If you’re looking for a way to spruce up your lessons on numbers 1-10, just go bananas!
It’s a great idea to incorporate different types of materials into each theme. For example, if you just practicing counting 1-10, both you and your students are going to get pretty bored, pretty quickly. But if you include a song, a story, a craft, a game or an activity where students get to move around, then they are going to learn the lesson in the context of the activity. They’ll be having so much fun that they won’t even realize that they’re learning, and you’ll be one happy teacher!
Here’s a great idea for a few ways to teach numbers 1-10 using the context of a banana…
Let’s start with a song. This song is great for very young learners, and you can expand on it for slightly older students (6-7) by asking what each group of bananas is doing:
Now let’s go for a game to reenforce the numbers that they have learned in the song. This game is great for small groups, but if you want to do it with a larger group, you just have to duplicate (or triplicate) the materials. I call this the “Banana Clothespins Game,” and it requires a little bit of preparation. You’ll need:
10 half-sheets of card or paper, each decorated with 1-10 bananas (you can draw the bananas or print them on a computer)
These will be your 1-10 banana flashcards!
55 clothespins (full-size clothespins work best for little fingers, but recycle them from home if you have them!)
Once you have your materials prepared, you’re ready to play!
Example of banana flashcards. Image Copyright Super Simple Learning.
Begin by showing the students the 1 banana flashcard and put 2 clothespins on it. Ask if it’s correct and let them help you fix it. Repeat with another banana flashcard, first giving the incorrect number and letting the students help you. Then give them two correct examples.
Now put all of the banana flashcards face-down and shuffle them. Deal them out evenly among students. Tell them that it’s a surprise and not to turn them over!
Put the clothespins in the middle of the group.
Explain the gameplay: Each student turns over his or her flashcards and puts the correct number of clothespins on the card. The first to finish all of his or her flashcards correctly wins (so you might want to make sure that you deal each student some high and low numbers to keep things fair).
Children love this game, and it can be played several times to review the numbers!
Now that students have practiced the numbers, let’s tell them a story about a little banana who falls out of a tree and wants to return to his family! This story is called “Fruit Story: ESL numbers/colors/fruit.” It also incorporates other fruits as well as colors!
If you are lucky enough to have a big budget for your classroom, you can also invest in this awesome monkey counting game that can be played in small groups. It’s available on Amazon!
Now that we’ve talked gone bananas over numbers, let’s make a craft! What animal loves bananas more than anything else? Monkeys! Let your students make a monkey mask, helping them to cut out the eyes carefully. You’ll need a little yarn to tie on the mask.
Courtesy of craftjr.com
You can print off some bananas with this image and let each student “feed the monkeys.” Try to print 10-15 on one page so that you can give students different numbers to practice! This is a great way to review counting again, as you can ask how many bananas they are feeding each other. Let them show the rest of the group and then do it in pairs!
These activities will give you several fun classes to learn and review the numbers 1-10 with your young learners! Just don’t go bananas when you hear students ask again for the banana song!
We all have rainy days. Those days when it might actually be raining, or when we are feeling under the weather, or when our students just aren’t up to par. These days can be a source of torture for both teachers and students, but if you develop a few skills, you can change your tactics and get great results!
Keep in mind that a few things might create a “rainy day” situation. If you or your students are ill, you won’t have the focus and energy needed for the classroom. If the students have had a change in routine (such as a field trip or a special activity at school), they might be too excited to focus on your normal class material. If it’s raining (or, please no!, snowing!), students’ focus might be on the window and not on you. And, let’s face it, sometimes kids are just kids, and there’s nothing we can do about it!
If you see that, despite several of your best efforts, the class is slowly sinking, it might be time to change your lesson plan.
One of my favorite “rainy day” activities is Newspaper Basketball. I love this game because it requires no preparation or special materials, kids love it, and it helps them burn off excess energy if they are too hyper to focus at the moment on your real lesson.
To play Newspaper Basketball, all you need is a piece of (recycled) paper and a trash bin. That’s it!
Ball up a piece of recycled paper and have students make a line. They have to get the “ball” in the bin standing close to the bin. If they make a basket, they move back one step (you can already have tape placed on your classroom floor marking the steps for an activity such as this!) and they say “Basket! One point!” If they don’t remember how many points – or the number – then they go back to the beginning. If you are playing with a small group, let the student continue until they miss. This is the mark to beat for the other students! The one who gets the furthest from the bin and makes a basket wins!
If you are playing with a large group of students, you will want to let them take turns.
Enjoy this “rainy day” activity the next time that you, or your students, are having one of those days…
ESL Lesson Plans 
