Go Fish!

This is an easy game to play, but it does take some prep work.

The basic concept is the same as a regular game of Go Fish:

1. deal 5 cards to each player.

2. Players take turns, asking other players for specific cards (to match cards already in his or her hand).

3. If the asking player receives a card from the ask-ee, he or she can ask for a card from a different player.

4. If the ask-ee does not have the requested card, he or she tells the asker to "go fish," meaning "draw a card from the central deck.

5. The game ends when one player has matched up and discarded all of his or her cards OR the central stack has been used up. If that is the case, the player with the most matching sets wins!

For ESL, you can use this concept with vocabulary or grammar or phrases. For example, if you are playing with beginners, you could make a deck of cards with colors, animals, foods, family members, etc. If you're playing with more advanced students, you could make a deck with parts of speech or tenses. Here are links to other teachers who have done this activity, as well: http://www.eslcafe.com/idea/index.cgi?display:1159772723-2945.txt and http://www.eslcafe.com/idea/index.cgi?display:1084153220-91558.txt.

Draw-a-question

I use this a lot as a warm-up activity; it gets students talking without having to put too much brain power into it. I usually use it more with Beginners or Intermediates, but you can most definitely adjust the questions for Advanced students or to complement a particular theme.

The basic principle is this:
1. Write questions on strips of paper and fold them up.
2. Mix them all up in a bag or hat or some other container.
3. Have students draw one.
4. Go around the circle so that everyone can answer.

Simple and effective.

Travel brochures

This is an activity that I've used in a lot of different classes and situations. I live in Ukraine, and Ukrainians are VERY artistic and talented with their hands. Incredibly talented, on the whole. They really warm up to this activity.

This activity doesn't take much prep; you just need paper and markers. The assignment is for the students to create travel brochures. I usually divide the students into groups of 3 or 4. I like for them to choose a location in our city or in Ukraine to write about. Tri-fold the paper. The students decorate the front as much as they want. On the inside, I usually require that they choose at least 5 things that visitors should either see or do, describing (in one or two sentences) those activities. I also have them choose 5 phrases- in Ukrainian or Russian- that they think would be useful for visitors to know how to say (one time, I got a brochure back that had the phrase, "Could you please tell me where to find borsch?"- borsch is soup, by the way). They are also to translate those phrases into English. They really seem to warm up to that part.

This activity is usually very well-liked. Often, I'll have them write out their phrases on scratch paper first, and we'll correct them. They really enjoy presenting their brochures to the class, as well. Here are some examples. I have others, but I can't seem to find them...Some students really do a fantastic job on the insides. Hope it's as fun for you and your students as it has been for me and mine!

My mom, sister, and I participated with one class: we made a brochure about Huntsville, AL.

More with Matching Cards (I promise I'm not obsessed)

Here's another activity I've done recently with my matching cards:

I divided the class into small teams and had each team draw 3 or 4 of the activity cards. Their assignment was to create clues/ definitions for their activities. After the groups finished writing their clues, they read them to the class and the other groups tried to guess which activity they were describing. They seemed to enjoy the mystery of it all.

Idea from Jaclyn!

Jaclyn posted this comment and idea yesterday. I hope to try it soon!

I'm always taking from you, so here's a fun activity I did today with my Int/Adv class: We read an article on personality last lesson, so we continued the theme today by discussing several words that describe personality or character traits. Then the class helped me make a list on the board of heroes and celebrities. We agreed that heroes and celebrities are famous or well known people, but yet they are very different. Then we wrote wrote another list in "t-chart form" of words that describe heroes and words that describe celebrities. I supplemented the lesson with other vocab and questions. Fun stuff!

Thanks, Jaclyn!

Those wonderful matching cards!

I wrote yesterday about the stuff I keep in my bag. One of those things were my matching cards. Just since yesterday, I've used them for a couple more activities. Here are some things I've used the cards for:

1. Matching. Clever, right?

2. Draw-a-card. Students (or teams) draw a card (or cards) and create sentences with the activity on the card. Sometimes, I give them guidelines, minimum requirements- so that they don't just write "I like soccer."

3. I have them create questions, using the activities. They can ask the questions of each other or write responses to their own questions. OR, they can switch questions and answer each other's questions.

4. Tonight, I had a lesson planned for my Beginner's class. Of course, when they showed up, I discovered that I needed to change/ adapt to the needs of the ones who showed up. They were having trouble with how to use the different forms of the verb "to be."

First, we made a chart

I: am/ was

You: are/ were

He, She, It: is/ was

We: are/ were

You: are/ were

They: are/ were

Then, I gave them prompts.

1. I am hungry. I will ___________.

I had them sort through the matching cards and find the ones that could be used to complete the thought (like, "get ice cream," "go to McDonald's").

2. I am bored. I will ___________. ("play soccer," "go for a walk")

This worked really well and gave them a lot of opportunity to practice making sentences. I seemed to give them a lot of confidence to have prompts. After a while, they began to create their own sentences!

Valentine's Day

For Valentine's Day, I didn't do a whole lesson on Valentine's Day, but we did dedicate part of the lesson to it. Before class, I found a copy of the first Valentine's story and then cut/reworded so that it wasn't too difficult for intermediates. I printed it and cut the story into strips, by sentence. The students' task was to try to put the story in the correct order. After that, we read through and translated it. By the time that we finished it, it was almost time to end class, but we did ask/ answer/ discuss several questions. Here's the version I used:

Valentine was a priest who lived in ancient Rome.

He refused to obey a law by the emperor that ordered young men to remain single.

The emperor supposedly did this to grow his army.

He believed that married men did not make good soldiers.

The priest, Valentine, however, secretly performed marriage ceremonies for young men.

When the emperor found out about this, he had Valentine arrested and thrown in jail.

On the evening before Valentine was to be executed, he wrote the first "valentine" himself.

It was to a young girl that he had become friends with.

It was a note that said, "From your Valentine."

Mary Poppins bag

Mrs. Linda was here with me this week, and she went with me to several of my classes. She suggested that I do a blog post about my ESL bag.

I have a bag that I take to all of my ESL classes. Whenever I plan for a class, I keep my plan book and any supplies for the lesson into my bag. I also keep extra supplies in there at all times. I don't know if this happens to everyone, but it happens to me ALL the time: I plan a lesson, targeting it toward one ability level, only to have students of a vastly different level show up. This drives my planning nature insane. So, in my bag, I keep supplies/games/activities that can be adapted for a lot of different lessons. This helps me keep my sanity.

Here's a list of things I almost always have in there:
1. scissors
2. tape
3. extra dry-erase markers
4. several sets of "Scrabble" tiles: I use the letter to play either Speed Scrabble or the spelling game

If you want to make your own set, click here to find a rubric.

5. a ziplock full of Starburst candy
6. a few sets of word searches or crossword puzzles

7. a few sets of matching cards: I use these for lots of activities. Sometimes, the students actually match the cards, sometimes play "Memory", sometimes use the activities as sentence or question prompts.

8. blank paper: these can be used for the interesting fact game, Hannah's letter game, or tons of other games that you may create in a moment of desperation.
9. extra pens
10. cards that have words written on them to play Charades or Pictionary
11. candy- to be used as a) prizes or b) bribes (kidding...sort of...)

I trade other things in and out periodically, but these are the staples. My Mary Poppins bag has saved my life...er...lesson (and attitude) on many occasions.

Time BINGO cards

Thought I'd include a picture of the time BINGO cards. This is just one card, but I have four different varieties- just make 4 prototypes and then photocopy them.

It's about Time

The Beginners and I worked on time this week. We had a really fun class! Last week, we had gone over telling the time. This included going over phrases like "a quarter after/'til," "half past," "midnight," "noon," etc. Just like 2nd grade, I drew times on a clock, and they told me what time it was.

This week, we reviewed that briefly and moved on to a review of months and days. After we'd successfully gotten a list of the months (in the correct order), we went back through and listed events that happen in each month (holidays mostly) and our birthdays. I asked them questions like, "What holiday is on February 14th?" We also went over the different seasons and categorized the months by season.

Following month review, we reviewed days of the week and created a "schedule" of things to do. One gal said, "SLEEP!" on each day. I'm guessing she doesn't get enough of that in her life...

At the end of the lesson, we play time BINGO. Hannah, Rachel, and I used this last year, and they loved it. Guess what- they still love it. We made BINGO grids (about 4 different varieties). There are 25 spaces (5x5 grid), and we filled them up with time words. Some of the squares have words like "January," "fall", "May 11." Some have pictures of clocks with times drawn in (1:45, 10:30, 6:15). In order to create "midnight," "half past," "a quarter after," the clocks are drawn without numbers- just the hands pointing to the correct positions. We also included numbers like 24 (hours), 365 (days), 366, 52 (weeks). We played about 3 or 4 rounds because they liked it so much!

When the semi-Beginners show up on Intermediate night...

Wednesday is usually Intermediate English Club night...this week, however, it apparently became high-Beginner night. Needless to say, the lesson plan that I had carefully crafted immediately became null and void. Thankfully, I had my Mary Poppins bag of supplies and my trusty Ira (now, unfortunately, most of you do not have a trusty Ukrainian friend at-the-ready...which is why I'll share her ideas here.).

I had some word searches in my bag. There are about a bazillion free websites where you can create your own word searches and crossword puzzles. I make fairly liberal use of those sites, and students really seem to enjoy the puzzles. The puzzle we used last night was an "Activities and Sports" puzzle. After giving them several minutes to go through and find as many as they could, we went around the table and defined/ described the activities listed. They did a really good job trying to describe how to play different sports, etc. At that point, Ira suggested that we do an activity that she does with her students (she's an English teacher in a public middle school). We taught these phrases:

1. I enjoy...

2. I am interested in...

3. I don't mind...

4. I can't stand...(if I were going to do it again, I'd probably change this one to "I don't like...")

5. I hate...

We gave each student a slip of paper. They wrote the sentences and filled in the blanks with activities. We told them not to write their names on them, had them fold up the papers, and we each drew someone else's. After reading through the list, everyone guessed whose paper they had. It went really well and opened up opportunities to correct word order or tense.

After we officially ended English club, we ended up sitting around for a while and just talking about things we like or don't like. It was really fun.

ALSO: I just added a new link to the sidebar. It's a site full of ESL games, contributed to by ESL teachers around the world. Some are not so exciting and some are SUPER! I'll list my top favorites in another post, but go ahead and have a look. Maybe you'll find some inspiration!

Beginner "Activities" continued...

We continued with the basic activities that we worked with last week. We used the same matching cards that we did last week; I had the students re-match them as a review. After we read through them and defined them again, I divided the students into pairs and gave each group five of the activity cards. They worked to create some simple sentences with the phrases, and then we discussed and corrected. After that, I introduced some new activities:

1. go to the bathroom (clarification: the picture on the card is of the stick man/woman figures from a bathroom sign.) I chose to do this one, because it has been an issue of confusion: in Ukraine, you do not ask where the bathroom is but rather where the toilet is. Most of the time (especially in houses), the toilet is in a separate room from the sink and the toilet. If you ask where the bathroom is, you will be taken to the sink room. Personal experience.

2. brush your teeth

3. take a shower

4. wake up

5. go to bed

6. take out the trash

7. take a bus

8. cook a meal

9. buy groceries

10. go for a run

This actually took up the whole class, even if it doesn't seem like a lot. Next week, we're going to start working on a story from the New Testament.