ESL Writing and Speaking Game

This is a link to a writing and speaking lesson I used with my higher level class last week. http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/writing-bingo/ The link has a great explanation about the activity, but I will add a couple of things I did slightly differently/ think were important.

Firstly I changed the topic from my vacation to my childhood memory. This was simply because I have recently done a vacation lesson. I added a couple of slightly different questions for the students to answer. I think this activity would work well with any topic.

Secondly I had a worksheet with a space for the students to write in which I told them they had to fill, most students got pretty close to filling it too. This mean that all the students wrote a decent length paragraph.

I wrote a paragraph about my own childhood memory before class and used it to play an example game before the students started. In the classes when I used my example the students all wrote a lot more and seemed more imaginative than the first time I did this lesson, where I just explained the activity to them.

Finally as my class has 20 students it would have taken too long to do each game separately, so I split the students into groups of five and they played the game in their groups. I then asked each groups winner to read out their paragraph to the class.

The activity took up a whole 50 minute lesson.

Ideas For Current Events Lessons

This is a list of current events lessons that I have used in my classes recently. My students are at the age where they are becoming interested in the news and current events, however it is still hard for them to understand authentic news sources. These lessons are perfect as they can use their existing knowledge of current events in all these activities, without having to spend ages reading an article! They then have to try and express their opinions about these events in English. These are the five activities that my students enjoyed the most.

7 ESL Activities on Songs, Bands and Music

I recently started planning a lesson on music for my both my beginner and intermediate high school classes. However due to a combination of teenagers loving to talk about music and there being a serious amount of ways to use music in ESL activities, this one off lesson on Music has become a series of 3 lessons. Here are the best activities I have used in these lessons.

Nike Just Do It Possibilities High School ESL Lesson.

This is a lesson based on the new (and FANTASTIC) Nike advert celebrating 25 years of the Just Do It slogan. Because this video is so great, in fact one of the best videos I have ever seen for using in class, I have used it in as many lessons as possible. Over the last few weeks I have used it in lessons about hobbies, sports and the past tense and I am pretty sure it could be used in many other topics. However for my high level high school I decided to dedicate a lesson solely to the advert. Most of my students are basketball/soccer mad boys so they were 100% motivated throughout the lesson and even asked to watch the advert again at the end of the lesson. Here is what I did.

Countdown High/Middle School ESL Lesson.

This is a great game lesson plan, perfect for any lessons you are given on short notice or if the students need a break before/after exams. Countdown is an English TV quiz show in which the contestants have to choose 9 vowels and consonants and then try to make as long a word as possible using these letters in 30 seconds. There is also a numbers game were the contestants have to choose 5 big or small numbers. A random number is then generated and the contestants have to add, subtract, multiply and divide the numbers to get as close to the generated number as possible. Here is a video so you can see both games in action!