Teach ESL to Kids

You need some easy ESL activities to use with beginning students, especially young children. These activities should help you along:

• A good shopping role-play is always good. With repeated practice, students will become quite good at this. The best part is that it’s useful when going abroad.
• Touching vocabulary cards. Many beginning students feel too shy to speak out. Playing a game where they are only required to identify the word/picture helps them to feel at ease.
• Group activities. Again, students may not want to be singled out early on. A game like Simon Says will help them to participate but not have to stand out or perform by themselves.
• Ask your neighbor a question. Have students sit in a circle and each student must ask their neighbor a question. This is super-easy if you’ve already modeled a grammar point (e.g. “Do you like cats?” “Yes I do.”/”No I don’t.”

For more ideas, check out the Quick and Easy Activities for ESL Students page.

Love,
Shannon Sensei

For any new teachers out there, here is the basic lesson plan format for toddlers that I use:

1. Hello Song/Greeting
2. Questions and Answers
3. Simple Concepts (ABSs, counting, colors, shapes, feelings, etc.)
4. Harder Concepts (vocabulary words–>nouns, verbs, adjectives; Use them in sentences if possible)
5. Dancing Time
6. Rewards

You can see a more fleshed-out version of this at the Daily Lesson Plan page.

Love,
Shannon Sensei

Here are some children’s winter craft ideas:

Paper Snowman
Hat and Gloves Craft

Snowman Painting

Love,
Shannon Sensei

I’m a big fan of using puppets to teach ESL to young learners, as you can see from this page on my main site, but you can use puppets for many more things than just a vehicle for getting kids to speak. You can:

• Use them to teach social concepts. For example, you can have one puppet be a bully and then ask the students if that was OK.
• You can have the puppet be the “bad guy”. For example, if you’re tired of always being the one scolding the students for being too loud, you can have a puppet who doesn’t like loud noises. That way it’s not the teacher that doesn’t like loud noises, but the puppet.
• Use them for role-play in lessons. Give out puppets to the students and have them practice different types of conversations.
• Let kids play with them in play time. I found that the puppets were always favorite toys during play time. Because I had modeled their use in class time, the students would like to use them when they were pretending to be teacher.

Love,

Shannon Sensei

While it’s great to have craft ideas that fit in with a particular theme, sometimes you just need to have some anytime crafts handy. These are things that can be easily done throughout the year.

The Easy Crafts for Kids page offers several quick ideas that don’t require much preparation.

Besides those, here are a few other good anytime crafts:

Names Craft
Hand and Feet Prints

Love,
Shannon Sensei

It’s important to take control of the class the second they walk through the door. If you don’t, you stand a good chance of the kids walking all over you. What you need are some great ideas to start a class.

With young kids, it works really well to start the class with a Hello Song. This can be anything at all…on a CD or something that you sing on your own.

If you have a class that you know is a bit “genki” (read: energetic or hyperactive), then you’ll want to start the class with something that’s a bit active. The Colors Game is great for younger kids while older ones might enjoy Simon Says. Doing something active right off the bat helps them to get rid of some of their extra energy, which will allow them to behave better throughout the rest of the class.

With a shy or quiet class, however, you may want to start with something like KABOOM, which tends to get them laughing and feeling more comfortable in the class. Watch out for cheaters!

Love,
Shannon Sensei

Songs, in my opinion, are one of the best ways to teach English to very young learners. When sung repeatedly, it is very easy for children to catch on to the words. You can also use them to teach a wide variety of concepts. But what are the best songs to teach ESL to children?

While I did use many different songs in my classroom, the best ones are the ones that teach useful concepts. A song like “Where is thumbkin?”, for example, may be fun…but the names of the different fingers are not so important for ESL students to learn.

So here are some of my favorite songs:

12345 Clap Clap (Good for counting),
7 Steps (Again, good for counting, but also counts backwards)
Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes (body parts)
Walking Walking (verbs)
If You’re Happy and You Know It (feelings, try to get one that changes the feelings, rather than the actions)

I also lovelovelove the Super Simple Songs CDs.
Love,
Shannon Sensei

As many of you know, I taught primarily 2 year olds so I have many craft ideas for 2 year olds. In fact, most of the ideas on the main craft page can be done with 2 year olds.

However, I thought I’d list some of my favorite craft ideas for 2 year olds:

The Butterfly Painting is great fun and comes out looking great! Make sure that you take the paper away from the students before it becomes brown from all the colors mixing together. If you need to, have a few extra pieces of paper around for the kids that like to keep painting.

Making hand and feet prints is also really fun with them. It’s so messy that many can’t believe you’re actually letting them do it!

The Pumpkin Craft is hard to get wrong. You just have to cut the pieces out yourself.

Finally, drawing the universe allows the kids to use what’s probably an unusual medium for them…chalk on paper. They’re really fun!

Have fun!
Love,
Shannon Sensei

For new teachers, one of the hardest things to get down is the lesson timing. Yet this is perhaps one of the most important things that you need to do!

Proper lesson timing ensures that your students are always busy. And when the students are always busy, there are less opportunities for them to get out of control. That’s why it’s so important to manage the timing of your lessons.

New teachers have a tendency to rush things. If they see that students don’t seem quite so interested, they hurry on to the next thing that they have planned. Unfortunately, what happens is that they breeze through all of the things that they planned…only to find that there’s still 10 minutes or more left to the lesson!

One of the things that I found to be effective in preventing this issue was to outline the timing of the lesson on paper before you start. Say your lesson starts at 1:00pm. Write our exactly what you plan to do between 1:00-1:10; 1:10-1:17; 1:17-1:30…and so on.

Hang this paper somewhere where you can see it during the lesson, but it doesn’t have to be obvious to your students.

This helps you to stay on task.

After awhile, you’ll have it all down and won’t need it anymore, but it sure helps in the beginning.

Another thing that you’ll want is to make sure that you always have a few extra “quickies” in your head. These are activities that don’t require a lot of preparation and can be done if you get to the end of your planned lesson and still have some extra time. In most cases, students will never know that you didn’t really plan on doing it that day.

These quick and easy activities for ESL students are great to have on hand.

Love,
Shannon Sensei

Valentine’s Day isn’t really the biggest holiday, but it does warrant a bit of a mention in the ESL classroom. These Valentine’s Day lesson ideas for ESL students should help get you started.

As always, you want to start introducing the ideas well before the actual holiday.

• First, if you don’t already have some Valentine’s Day flashcards, you can print some out for free at MES English. He also has some Valentine’s Day worksheets available, depending on the ages of your students.
• I like to teach the phrase “I love you.” This is the perfect Valentine’s Day phrase and it really impresses the parents when their kids can say “I love you.” in English.
• Two kids’ songs that are Valentine’s Day related are “I Love You, You Love Me” and “You are My Sunshine”. Kids like both of these songs. Make sure that you create actions to go along with these songs as they’re a bit boring on their own.
• You can also do some Valentine’s Day crafts. Two that I have are The Cup of Love and A Heart Person.

Hope that you and your kids enjoy these Valentine’s Day lesson ideas!
Love,
Shannon Sensei