Check out our best ESL activities for kindergarten kids to try out in your classes today. Have some fun with English and kindy kids.
Check out these private teaching activities and games for your ESL lessons. Keep things fresh and interesting in your 1-1 English classes.
Have you ever used songs to teach English vocabulary? Check out this post for top tips and sign up for a free La La Land lyrics lesson plan
Check out this present simple (simple present) ESL games, activities, lesson plans, worksheets and more for teaching this grammar in style!
Teaching Materials and lessons for English teachers. Easy to teach lessons from ESL Teacher 365. Teaching tips and advice.
Check out the top present continuous ESL games, activities, lesson plans, and worksheets. Have some fun teaching this grammar concept.
Check out the top picks for ESL Time Filler games and activities. Kill some time in English class with these fun activities.
Check out these 15 passive games and activities for ESL, along with worksheets, lesson plans, and details about the passive vs active voice.
Check out the following ESL lesson plans and lesson plan templates to get your teaching on in style! It's English teaching made easy!
Teaching mixed level ESL classes can be quite the challenge, especially speaking classes but it's not impossible. Check out these tips!
100+ Printable board games and templates for kids and beginner ESL students. Download and use in class today!
Looking for a fun way to engage adult ESL learners in learners their alphabet, letter sounds and letter formation? I plan to cover all thos...
There is a wide range of Language Learners. Some students may have a strong educational background in their native country. You might have some students who have interrupted schooling. There are others who might have gone to school, but only for a few years. When they arrive in your classroom ready to learn, you have a melting pot of situations. I want you to know you are not alone. I would like to share with you some effective tips I have used in my classroom. PLUS provide you with an ESL Curriculum Map for the school year. You need a plan. I cannot stress this to you enough. Before you get into how you are going to teach the students, you first need to determine what you are teaching. This means sitting down and mapping out your lessons for the year. It does not have to be detailed, but you do need to guide of what you are teaching. I know a common struggle is not having a curriculum. That is why I want to provide you with an ESL Curriculum Guide that will provide you with topics and ideas for the school year. If you do have textbooks, look at the table of contents in your textbook for topics. The table of contents can be your guide in creating your plans. Using stations in your newcomer classroom is beneficial. Stations are so much fun and students simply love them. Who doesn’t want to be independent? In my classroom, I have a listening station, speaking station, writing station, and work with-teacher station. This allows me to address the needs of all the ELLs (English Language Learners) in my classroom. Here is the secret to making stations successful: You need a PLAN! Make sure you explicitly teach the procedures of each station. You can use the ESL Curriculum Guide and/or your own guide to determine the stations. “I’m Done!” When I first started teaching students screamed those words all day. I really had to take a deep look at what I was doing in my classroom. I discovered that the content I was providing some of my newcomers was simply too easy. If the students can complete an activity in 5 minutes, the activity is not rigorous enough for their levels. How did I solve this problem? I planned for three different levels of ELLs. Now the words “I’m Done” are nonexistent in my classroom. When creating your classroom content make the lessons concrete and tangible. To make lessons tangible and concrete include visuals, videos, manipulatives, and field trips. For example, you are teaching about classrooms around the world. To make the lesson concrete for your newcomers you can include videos and pictures of classrooms around the world. Engaging content is so important in a classroom. Take a survey of what the students are interested in, and include some of the topics they love. Finally, stay consistent in your classroom. Consistency speaks so loudly with students. Also, if something is not working don’t be afraid to say this is not working and change it up! If you need help in planning your lessons, DOWNLOAD THE ESL CURRICULUM GUIDE! I would love to hear about how you are teaching newcomers in your classroom. Leave a comment below with your tips and questions.
Check out the following ESL lesson plans and lesson plan templates to get your teaching on in style! It's English teaching made easy!
Check out the best ESL kindergarten games, activities, lesson plans, worksheets and more. Have better kindy English classes today!
Let's be real, planning weekly lessons in the ESL classroom can be an overwhelming task. Factors include caseloads and the sheer number of students/small groups serviced. Also, heterogenous groupings with a variety of language levels make it difficult to target specific language needs of students. Perhaps you're a new teacher and simply haven't had the guidance yet on planning ESL lessons. Here are a few tips to help make planning less stressful. ESL instruction is often vague because, in most cases, there's no curriculum to follow or even to guide. We are left to our own devices to plan and provide lessons for our students that build language skills in the four language domains of listening, reading, speaking and writing. That alone can make planning overwhelming. Tie in grade level content and setting language goals, and it's a LOT to consider! Let's start with a few pre-planning tips. These will support successful lesson planning. PRE-PLANNING TIPS 1- Lesson Planner Book It's really important to have a place to keep all things planning in one place. I don't know where I'd be without my lesson plan book. Things I keep in my planner in addition to lesson plans are: 1- Student lists with ELP levels broken down by each domain, 2- The curriculum my students are learning in their gen ed classrooms so that I can integrate my ELD lessons with the grade level content whenever possible, 3- A calendar to keep me on track with events that impact my instructional schedule, such as meetings and testing, 4- Language goals and data collection to track student progress. There are some really awesome print and go planners, as well as digital planners out there. Find one that suits your needs AND brings you joy. :) 2- Know Your Students One of our main goals is to take students from their current language proficiency level to the next level. Knowing students and their needs is critical to planning appropriate lessons. Students have an English Language Proficiency (ELP) level, but what does that mean exactly? So, my student has an ELP level 3, but what can she do in each language domain? I won't know what to teach her if I don't know the starting point for her. Look at the breakdown of all 4 language domains and identify the weaker domains for each student. Keep this information in your plan book, or somewhere easily accessible. This is valuable information, but it's a very small piece of data. More importantly, I need to know what my students can do right now. Their latest scores might be 6 months old, so I want to also gather current data. Assessments I give at the beginning to determine starting points: phonemic awareness (newcomers) phonics writing (give a prompt that students have plenty of background knowledge) reading I need to know what level of reading I can expect from students, not just with decoding, but more importantly comprehending. For writing, if my student is a newcomer with little to no English, I want to see a sample of their writing in their native language. This will give a lot of information about the literacy skills new students bring to the table. Once I know what my students CAN DO, I can then plan targeted ELD lessons to meet their language and literacy needs. Without this information, I'd be trying to hit a target in the dark, and that's not servicing the students or myself. 3- Student Placement in Small Groups Each small group, in my opinion, should be homogeneous. I group students according to needs, not necessarily by ELP level, although generally it works out that most level 3 students, for example, have similar needs, but not always. Grouping students with similar needs is key to targeting the skills they need to move from one level to the next. OK, I've got my plan book, my student data and my small groups identified by need. Now what? Tips to Make Lesson Planning Less Stressful 1- Consistent Weekly Activities Incorporate consistent activities that target your students' needs, preferably that don't require planning time, and add them in your plan book every week. For example, I go through my plan book and add "phonics" to certain days for certain groups each week, so that's one less thing I need to plan. I have all the phonics materials on hand, so I simple print out and copy what I need and go. I also do an Idiom of the Week activity and a "Friday Focus on Grammar" for other groups. Those automatically go into my lesson plan book each week as well! Several of my groups have a warm-up activity when they first come into my room. The activity takes about 5-10 minutes, but that's another chunk of time I don't need to plan. My level 1s and 2s have an irregular sight word booklet, and my level 3s and 4s have a Restate the Question writing prompt. Irregular Sight Words - Warm Up Activity Finding consistent and meaningful weekly activities to add to your plan book cuts down on planning time. Other examples of weekly activities: -Grammar lessons (so many possibilities- What do YOUR students need?) -Vocabulary - multiple meaning words, synonyms/antonyms, shades of meaning words, content vocabulary, affixes, thematic monthly vocabulary, etc. -Idiom of the Week -Word Work - Affixes is a great focus area! -Read Alouds -Let's Talk! -oral language activities (purposeful oral language development is so important) One of my favorite "Let's Talk!" activities is projecting a picture and having students talk about what they see happening. It could be content related or simply an interesting photograph. An awesome resource for this is Chuck Dillon's website. He's such a fantastic illustrator! Each picture has tons of action, which means there's never a shortage of things to talk about. Pick a couple of "Weekly Activities" and plug them into your plan book each week. Here's a blog post that shares "3 Weekly Activities that Do Not Require Planning." 2 - "Go-To" Activities These are helpful to have on hand whenever you feel unsure about what to plan next, or you just need a meaningful "filler" lesson. We all need those from time to time. These lessons are still high-quality lessons that target the needs of our students, but they don't require planning time. Some Go-To Activity Examples: PWIM with any picture (picture word inductive model) Inferring using pictures 5 Ws and H using pictures Mind Maps Language Games This Build a Sentence activity uses the PWIM strategy to generate words about a picture. In this activity, we use the words to generate sentences of varying lengths. And on this particular day, I also challenged my students to use position words in their sentences. To start, I ask students to tell me something they see in the picture. The students generate the words and I write them on the board in different colors depending on the part of speech. Students also generate the sentences, and I support with grammar, as needed. It's a great activity to have on hand, as it covers many skills and is easily adaptable. They are "one and done" lesson activities that are meaningful AND build language skills. Having a variety of these resources to pull from definitely makes planning less stressful because I know I have language building lessons that I can plug in whenever needed. 3- Language Function or Thematic Units If you know me at all, you know I LOVE planning and teaching language function units. This truly makes my planning less overwhelming. MOST, if not all, of my students across multiple grade levels work on building language around the same language function, so when I plan, I have one LF in mind for everyone. Whoo-hoo! For example, when I teach the language of Compare and Contrast, I focus on that language with all of my groups. I don't have 10 different groups doing 10 different things; they are ALL learning the language of Compare/Contrast, which makes planning SO much more manageable! Some groups might need more focus on expressive language skills while others need more practice with receptive language skills, but I know that the overarching focus for all is the language of Compare/Contrast. Plus, often times I can reuse lessons with multiple groups. Halleluiah! And by tweaking lessons with some additional scaffolds, I can use them with even more groups. This is a huge time saver! Language Function: Compare/Contrast Language Function: Fact/Opinion Each language function unit lasts about 4 weeks; and once it's planned out, there's not a lot of additional planning that needs to be done during that time period. I don't start a new unit until all my groups are finished, so while I'm finishing up the unit with some groups, I use "filler" lessons with the groups that are already done. To learn more about incorporating language function units in the ESL classroom, check out the blog post links below. 4- Reusing lessons is honestly my #1 tip for making planning more manageable and less stressful. And maybe you can't use an entire lesson with multiple groups, but you can use a portion of the lesson. How many groups can I use this lesson with? How can I tweak this lesson so that I can use it with more groups? Those are questions I ask myself as I plan. RECAP: 1- Incorporate Consistent Weekly Activities (phonics, grammar, vocabulary) and plug them into your plan book each week. 2- Go-To Activities (have a variety of meaningful filler activities on hand) 3- Language Function Units (all groups learning the same Language Function) 4- Reuse Lessons with multiple groups! As I mentioned earlier, sometimes the overwhelming feeling of planning comes from the sheer number of students and groups serviced. Or it could be that our numbers are low, but we service 6-12 grade levels. Many ESL teachers travel between schools. There's a variety of reasons that can make planning stressful. Regardless of the reasons, having these tools in your teacher toolbox can help make planning less stressful. Linked below are some of the blog posts and instructional resources mentioned in this post. Teaching Language Functions with English Learners Language Forms and Functions in the ESL Classroom
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Check out these fun games and activities for teaching was were to English learners, along with worksheets & lesson plans.
FUN ESL Lesson plans on many topics. All the lesson plans on this page come complete with all the games, activities, and materials you need. All for FREE.
Follow this step-by-step lesson plan to teach your students how
Need help teaching the past tense to English (ESL) learners? Read on for valuable tips on making grammar fun, and free printables to help!
Check out the top picks for present continuous ESL activities, games, lesson plans & worksheets. Have some fun with the present progressive.
As I am looking forward to a new school year in my new school, I have already started planning and creating new resources. Since I have my classroom now and I can finally make the big decisions about the teaching materials I would love to use, I am all excited to be able to say good-bye to textbooks and use what I believe best responds to my learners’ needs. If you are looking for some engaging and valuable resources for your textbook-less ESL class or you wish to supplement your own materials,
Teaching English to beginners may be a daunting task, but not when you are prepared with these ESL worksheets for beginners! Simply view and download for free.
Check out the top icebreakers and ESL activities for first day of class that will get your students talking and getting to know each other.
Teaching English with songs is a great way to boost student engagement. Check out these 17 ideas for activities using music and songs!
English Language Development instruction often focuses on the Forms and Functions of language. This resource provides templates, planning pages and suggestions for preparing a language function unit. Formats include printable pdfs, fillable pdfs and digital Google Slides. Take a closer look at the preview to see if this resource is right for you. Included: -Suggestions For Use -Considerations When Planning -Map It Out (2 pgs.) for "drafting" out the unit -Learning Targets/Sentence Frames/Anchor Chart sketch -Activities Chart for gathering Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing resources -Language Functions UNIT planning page -Language Functions LESSON planning page (for your individual groups) -Keep Track - for keeping organized with which groups have finished each lesson in a unit Everything you'll need to PLAN your language functions unit is all right here! Language Function Resources: Opinion and Persuade Cause and Effect Plants and the Four Seasons Sequencing Compare and Contrast Activities Compare and Contrast Digital Activities Comparative and Superlative Adjectives Language Functions Display Board (as seen in my Instagram Stories) Language Functions Planning Pages (print and digital) For the ESL Teacher: ESL Teacher Planner Language Domains Interactive Bulletin Board Language Goals Mega Bundle (Each also sold separately.) Language Goals for Kindergarten My resources are 50% off for the first 24 hours! "Follow Me" to receive notifications of new product postings! Terms of Use: Purchasing this resource provides the purchaser with one user license and the permission to use with his/her students only. To share, additional licenses, school licenses and district licenses are available at a discounted rate. Posting any portion of this resource online, such as a classroom website or a shared school server is not allowed. All Rights Reserved - 2020 © Kristen Vibas @ A Walk in the Chalk
"Why even do this?", students might ask when they are not sure why they need to complete certain tasks. Student motivation and engagement are possibly the most important variables in the learning process. Identifying clear objectives and providing students with a purpose for carrying out various activities will more likely engage them as they will see the benefits of completing the proposed tasks. Because most of my high school ESL learners need a lot of motivation in school, I like to assign di
If you need some help planning your lessons, check out this ESL listening lesson plan template. It's based on the Cambridge CELTA/DELTA courses.
ESL ELL EL EFL EAL ESL Newcomer Scope and Sequence. Year-Long Curriculum for EL newcomer students. Each month breaks down teaching into: Letters/Word Families Mini-Lessons Sight Words (DOLCH+) ****TPT Credits**** Leaving feedback gives you TPT credits to use for future purchases! Thanks in advance! ****File Details**** Please make sure you are able to open this file type before purchasing. ****Terms of Use**** These products were created by ©ELL Breaking Barriers and are copyright protected. Download for individual/classroom use only. Please purchase additional licenses to share with colleagues. Do not share or copy downloads. Products are not to be used for commercial use and by downloading the copyrights remain with ELL Breaking Barriers. This download contains copyrighted graphics. You may not sell, redistribute, recreate, or use in your own commercial creations. Pictures of my product are allowed, with credit included & a link to my store. ****SHARING with your department or team? You MUST purchase multiple licenses of the product, one for each teacher that will be using the resource. Thank you!*** ****Contact**** Website [email protected] Facebook Instagram ****Resources you might like**** ESL Progress Monitoring Newcomer Support Engaging Games and Activities Teaching Character Traits Enjoy!! ELL Breaking Barriers
Check out these games and activities for ESL pronunciation, along with worksheets and lesson plans. Help your students with pron today!
Have your ESL students create a one-minute long commercial and present it to the class. This resource is project-based learning for intermediate to advanced ESLs. Students will have a blast collaborating and researching a given destination. ESLs will practice reading, writing, listening and speaking as they share their commercials. This is also a great way to practice using idioms. What do you get? Teacher Directions Teacher Notes Project Introduction Project Requirements Sample Script Research Notes Handout Destinations (with a few blank ones so you can add your own if you'd like!) Rubric ESL teachers: This is the perfect lesson plan for when you're out. Print it off and it is READY-TO-GO for a substitute. See preview for product in its entirety. Everything you need is right here. Tip: Keep students engaged and practice listening by having them write down two facts from each of their peers' presentations. Bonus points for any idioms they hear and jot down! ***This resource is included in ESL Project Based Learning BUNDLE.*** Like this resource? Leave feedback and earn credit on future purchases!
Check out these irregular verb games and activities for ESL, along with worksheets, practice opportunities, lesson plans & more
Tell me if this sounds familiar to you: You’re standing at the front of your ESL classroom (or sitting at your computer screen) and you’ve planned an amazing lesson out. You have a great Powerpoint…
