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Christmas is approaching and students are getting more and more excited about the coming holidays. Here are some ESL materials for Christmas to keep them busy in these last orange- and cinnamon-flavoured weeks of 2022:
Browse through some useful materials for Halloween for YL and teen ESL students.
ESL materials for Easter: quizzes, songs and worksheets LOOKING FOR COOL WORKSHEETS FOR YOUR ESL LESSON? 7 worksheets for kids and pre-teens: I spy, guided colouring, picture riddles with Easter characters, writing worksheets, secret messages for Easter, etc. READ MORE 10 worksheets for cool kids about Easter: Easter Egg Hunt printable cards, worksheets with colourful pictures to teach vocabulary & grammar and improve speaking etc. READ MORE 3 worksheets for teen ESL students: picture-based writing, writing with egg idioms and an interactive online worksheet for speaking & writing. READ MORE EASTER – 17th April 2022 VIDEO QUIZ (B1): Practise strong
SALES! Picture riddle worksheets to add colours to your lessons.
FREE SAMPLE available.
Why would you need to make quizzes and surveys with Google Forms? Let’s see. Would you like to organise a super birthday party but you don’t know what music to play and what theme to choose? You ask your friends, but they don’t give real answers? Ask them in an anonymous survey. Make a Google form with your questions, just like this: Loading… Send this form to your best friends and shortly after, you will have a clear idea what party might blow their mind. This mini-course helps you get an expert in creating this type of forms. So, let
Raising children in the era of screens puts any parent into a difficult position: we know – and say – that they should not exceed one hour a day, but – to be honest – it’s sometimes not feasible. Just consider 2020-2021 lockdown periods when parents had to keep on working to maintain their jobs with their kids going crazy around them. So like it or not, kids spend a lot of time in front of screens. Parents’ task, therefore, is not only to try and reduce the overtime, but also to engage kids in useful (I’d say educative) activities.
One more week to go and the Christmas holidays are here. So these last lessons before the big celebrations should be about fun and Christmas vocabulary. This 10-page activity book has seven colouring tasks for 6-12-year old YL classes ready to print&go.
Cambridge YLE preparation books scaffold vocabulary in an excellent way: they don’t only teach the words/expression, but guarantee that these lexical items are revised several times over the year. Before a progress test or before the final exam, you might find some revision lessons useful and – above all – fun. One engaging way to revise vocabulary is to play TABOO.
If you prepare kids for YL exams (Cambridge STARTERS, MOVERS, FLYERS), then you are well familiar with the official wordlist. However, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the taught lexical items. With some textbooks, you don’t have to worry about anything: they teach and revise the requested vocabulary. On the other hand, if you teach classes without a textbook and/or with your own materials, you might find these Cambridge wordlists (Progress Checkers) useful.
This is the final week of ELT-Tutor’s Appy Advent Scratch Challenge (See the Advent Calendar here). For another 7+2 days, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so instead of memorizing code strings, kids
Welcome to the third week of ELT-Tutor’s Appy Advent Scratch challenge (download the Appy Advent Calendar here). Just like in the first two weeks, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game every day, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so
Welcome to the second week of this year’s Advent challenge with Scratch (Here’s the Advent calendar with the entire program). As you know, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game every day, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so instead
Looking for an alternative Advent Calendar? This year, I’d like to invite young and old explorers, creators, discoverers to spend the coming 4 weeks with a daily coding challenge. Every day, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc.
Teachers often face the hard reality that their students cannot purchase text books or their schools require self-made materials. Many of us continue teaching online and need some visuals they can screen-share and which then engage their sitting students. Most of the times we prepare for YL exams, but lack enough materials and books with only sample tests are really monotonous to teach. All this can be solved with these booklets covering relevant topics, with a great amount of visuals, engaging and fun activities and integrated exam tasks (Cambridge Starters, Movers and Flyers). Take a look!
Exit tickets? What are they? When to use them? And how? Let’s see. There are two delicate parts in every lesson: the lead-in and the wind-down. Of course, the main part is about the target language, but its success depends on how you introduce the topic. The same importance needs to be given also to the last five minutes of a lesson: if a student leaves your classroom excited, satisfied, their brain will connect the new grammar or vocabulary to previous knowledge – what’s more faster and with a great number of new connections. Whereas, annoyed and confused students block
Another Scratch app this time to use and remake. It helps your students practise to find and describe differences in pictures and for Scratchers it’s a nice way to practise costume-change and sprite editing. Find the differences Instructions: Click onto the green flag and then memorize the picture for 30 seconds.Then click the A key on your keyboard and note 5 differences.Finally, click onto SPACE and not 6 differences.Do you have a good memory? For Scrachers, SEE INSIDE, it’s a simple costume-change code, however, in some cases, you need to move the sprite away from its centre point. You might
For today, another Scratch animation to help your ESL students practise how to say dates in English. Telling the date & coding – two functions in one task: What’s today’s date? Instructions: Click onto the Green Flag, then onto SPACE. After some seconds, you will see a date.First question: Is it a real date? (30 February 2000 is NOT)Second question: How do you pronounce it? (e.g. the first of February nineteen – eighty four)Third question: Was it in the past or will it be in the future or maybe this is today’s date?Then press SPACE again… and again… For Scrachers,
Talking about clothes is always a great opportunity to revise not only vocabulary linked to fashion, colours and shades, but also to recap the word order ‘adjective + noun’. Last but not least, it is also a great opportunity to play. In this post, I’d like to show you one Scratch animation and one follow-up activity for both, online and classroom lessons. The animation (Scratch challenge): Instruction: Click onto the green flag and after a while stop the animation with the red button (or the space key). Describe what Daisy is wearing. For Teachers: You can play this game with
Today let me show you – and challenge all Scratch coders – with a Scratch animation to practise for Cambridge Movers Speaking Part 3: Which one is different and why?
INTRODUCTION: TEACHING YL LESSONS This year I’m on maternity leave, well not officially, since in Italy mothers are requested to re-enter their jobs 3-4 months after their child’s birth, but let’s say, I’ve become a freelance mummy-teacher. What does that mean? In the morning, I started running an English home-nursery, while in the afternoon, I started teaching kids. On Wednesdays, I have lessons with my Mini Heroes, 6-7 year old boys (only boys). Obviously, my lesson planning is completely different from my good old lessons to adults and I usually need a shower after a lesson with them, but being
September 2021 – How is this school year going to be? Face-to-face, online, locked down? Whatever the answer is, we are happy to be back to school… and back to some great playful Cambridge YL Starters, Movers, Flyers exercises. Check out these ESL materials:
February 2021 – Teaching English to CHILDREN is fun. Teaching English to children ONLINE is a challenge. The task to prepare children for English exams online is an adventure… if you do it in a fun way. Today, I’d like to give you some quick tips how to do a great lesson with elementary school kids online using comics and preparing for Cambridge A1 Movers or A2 Flyers exams.
January 2021 – Online lessons with Young Learners are challenging for many reasons: apart from problems with internet connection, tired eyes and the demotivating fact of not being really together with their peers, it also forces kids into a very passive sitting life style. You need to consider that kids are usually not really comfortable with opening different types of documents (pdf, doc, etc.) and it is also difficult for the teacher to monitor their written work (checking for spelling mistakes, for instance). In this post, I’d like to propose a lesson plan to teach daily routines to kids online,
January 2021 – This is the last part of a three-post serie, giving suggestions on how to use Scratch codes in teaching English (and coding) to Young Learners (above all in online YL lessons). In the first part, I describe simple animations to revise numbers and prepositions of place, while in the second post, mazes were proposed to practice giving directions and question-answer animations. This time, I invite you to adventure into the Scratch world of quizzes and stories.
January 2021 – In my previous post, I suggested that teachers giving online lessons to YL try out some alternative tasks using the programming language Scratch. This coding program was customized for elementary school students to introduce them to the universe of algorithms, sequencing, variables and others. So the main aim of the Scratch project is to teach coding to pupils. However, Scratch could come in really handy when giving online English lessons to Young Learners. In Part One, you can read about how to practise numbers and prepositions of places with Scratch animations. In this post, I’d like to
January 2021 – As many of my colleagues, I ended up teaching completely online nearly a year ago. With teen and adult classes, the switch to video-call lessons was surprisingly smooth. However, things were not as easy with online English lessons with YL (Young Learners). Mainly, because parents – among them myself – were worried about how much time their children spent in front of different screens and secondly, because my students were used to lessons full of movement and games. We desperately needed inspiration. It came from one of the many Future Learn courses.
December 2020 – When preparing YL for an exam with a written part, special attention must be paid to spelling. Children are usually exposed to English at a very early age and they might be familiar with a wide range of vocabulary in English. However, being able to write these words takes time, since their mother tongue needs to be prioritized.
November 2020 – If you are teaching kids online or without a structured textbook and you might be looking for some materials how to introduce your students to simple past forms of regular verbs. Here is an idea how to:
November 2020 – Here is a lesson plan for a possible Christmas lesson online with young learners. The ideal age could be 7-12, level A2 (Flyers/Key for schools).
November 2020 – It’s not easy to remember that the days of the week and months start with a capital letter and it is even harder to recall their correct spelling. These two quick quizzes aim to make the kids practise:
November 2020 – My Superhero’s Typical Day is a lesson plan / idea how to teach and practise daily routines and third person singular to/with YL (kids aged between 6-10). This lesson plan is suitable for online lessons.Your students should be familiar with the use of the modal verb can.