Teaching ESL/EFL to Children Collection: Speaking Activities, Review Games, & No-Prep Ideas for English Lessons

By Jackie Bolen

Have better TEFL classes with the Teaching ESL/EFL to Children Collection. It's designed for English teachers of children all over the world. 

 

The Teaching ESL/EFL to Children Collection consists of three books: 

• No-Prep/Low-Prep ESL Speaking Activities for Children
• ESL Review Games and Activities for Kids
• English Teacher Emergency (Last-minute, no-prep activity classroom ideas)

Jackie Bolen has fifteen years of experience teaching ESL/EFL to students in South Korea and Canada. With her help, you'll improve your English classes for kids in no time at all.  

 

This 3-book collection will help you . . .

• Save tons of time when lesson planning
• Have more interesting and engaging classes for children
• Learn how to be a more effective language teacher
• Pick up some ideas for creative lessons

Get your copy of the Teaching ESL/EFL to Children Collection today and get ready to improve your teaching skills in a big way, quickly and easily. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jackie Bolen
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201203085

Book preview

Teaching ESL/EFL to Children Collection:

Speaking Activities, Review Games, & No-Prep Ideas for English Lessons

Jackie Bolen

www.eslactivity.org

Copyright © 2022 by Jackie Bolen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher/author at the addresses below.

Jackie Bolen: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

Teaching ESL/EFL to Children:........................................................1

About this Book..................................................................4

About the Author: Jackie Bolen......................................................5

39 No-Prep/Low-Prep ESL Speaking Activities.........................................6

Games and Activities for All Levels...............................................14

Games and Activities for Lower-Level Students.....................................39

Games and Activities for Higher-Level Students.....................................57

39 ESL Review Games and Activities................................................77

4-Skills Review Activities.......................................................78

Speaking & Listening Review Activities...........................................83

Reading Review Activities.....................................................101

Writing Review Activities......................................................107

English Teaching Emergency .....................................................116

Lower Level Multi-Skill ESL Activities...........................................120

Higher Level Multi-Skill ESL Activities...........................................127

Lower Level Reading & Writing Activities........................................136

Higher Level Reading & Writing Activities........................................140

Lower Level Speaking & Listening Activities......................................143

Higher Level Speaking & Listening Activities......................................152

Helpful Tips & Tricks for Teaching ESL/EFL to Children ..............................158

About this Book

Welcome to this book designed to help you be a better English teacher for children! It's a collection that consists of three books:

−  No-Prep/Low-Prep ESL Speaking Activities for Kids

−  ESL Review Activities for Children

−  English Teacher Emergency (no-prep, last minute ESL activities for the classroom)

I hope that you find this book useful! Please get in touch with me if you have any questions or comments and I'd love to hear from you.

Jackie Bolen: [e-mail].

About the Author: Jackie Bolen

Itaught English in South Korea for a decade to every level and type of student and I've taught every age from kindergarten kids to adults. These days, I'm living in Vancouver and teaching English to a variety of students. In my spare time, you can usually find me outside surfing, biking, hiking or on the hunt for the most delicious kimchi I can find.

In case you were wondering what my academic qualifications are, I hold a Master of Arts in Psychology. During my time in Korea, I completed both the Cambridge CELTA and DELTA certification programs. With the combination of years teaching ESL/EFL learners of all ages and levels, and the more formal teaching qualifications I've obtained, I have a solid foundation on which to offer teaching advice. I truly hope that you find this book useful and would love it if you sent me an email with any questions or feedback that you might have—I'll always take the time to personally respond ([e-mail]).

Jackie Bolen around the Internet

ESL Speaking (www.eslspeaking.org)

Facebook (www.facebook.com/eslspeaking)

YouTube: (www.youtube.com/c/jackiebolen)

If you can't get enough ESL games, activities and other useful stuff for the classroom in this book, you can get even more goodness delivered straight to your inbox few days. I promise to respect your privacy—your name and email address will never be shared with anyone for any reason. Sign-up here.

You might also be interested in checking out these other books which are easy to find wherever you like to buy books:

39 Awesome 1-1 ESL Activities for English Teachers of Kids

49 ESL Writing Activities for English Teachers of Kids and Teenagers

39 No-Prep/Low-Prep ESL Speaking Activities

Jackie Bolen

www.eslactivity.org

Who This Book is for

This book will be helpful for those who teach children age 7+. While there are a few activities in this book which will work for younger children, most of our experience (and activity ideas!) has been in elementary schools.

This is a book for those new to teaching English to children. Maybe you've only been teaching for a few months or have never set foot in an ESL classroom before. These activities will provide a solid foundation to get you started with making your classes enjoyable, for both you and the students.

Or, perhaps you've been searching the Internet, trying to find some new ideas for ESL speaking games and activities, but are tired of wading through the haystack to find the needle that you can actually use in your classes. Our aim is that this will be an extremely practical resource to help make your children's ESL speaking or conversation classes interesting and fun, as well as making your lesson planning very easy. We hope that you'll keep coming back to this book again and again.

How to Use ESL Speaking Activities for Kids

Activities in the classroom are a way to make practicing new language and recycling previously learned material more engaging and less stressful for students. In practice, most students will be bored with material long before they've actually mastered it so using a variety of activities to reinforce the same vocabulary and structures will make the old seem new again.

Speaking can also be quite difficult and stressful for most students, even more so than writing, because while their writing may only be seen by the teacher, their peers will also hear them speak. Making a game of speaking draws more students in because there are elements of competition and play to it.

The activities presented in this book should be seen as a supplement to course books and they are not designed to provide a comprehensive course of instruction. Instead, they can be used to spice up a lesson and are perfect for warm-up, review, or game days. Some of these activities will be better suited for use in conjunction with some material than others, and some types of students than others. You know your students and what types of activities they respond to and enjoy so choose what will be most useful for them. If you need some advice about which activities to use for a particular situation, please send either of us an email and we'd love to help you.

Tips for Teaching ESL Speaking

Reduce Stress Whenever Possible

If you haven't been a language student recently, think of a time when you traveled abroad and had to order a meal or direct a taxi driver in a foreign language. Imagine if your friends and peers had been watching and a teacher had been judging your fluency and accuracy. That is what speaking activities feel like for a lot of students: frustrating, embarrassing, and generally miserable, especially for lower level students.

In speaking class, a large part of the teacher's job is reducing stress, so that students feel relaxed enough to participate. You can do this by not shining the spotlight on individuals unless they're up for it, focusing more on pair or small group activities instead of whole class ones and always give students a chance to practice the language with a partner before having to speak in front of the class.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Reduce the new terms and structures introduced in a single lesson. Students may be able to memorize spelling lists and possibly even the definitions, but assimilating words into working vocabulary is a far more difficult task. Unless your students are only studying English in order to pass a multiple choice test, large vocabulary lists are a frustrating waste of time. Reuse and recycle previous lessons in order to cement the concepts in your students’ minds and facilitate real learning instead of focusing on short-term memorization.

Model Everything

Writing teachers love to say, Show. Don’t tell. In language class, it's best to do both. It is not enough to tell your students what you want them to do—show them as well. This applies equally to book work, tests, and games. No matter how slowly and clearly you deliver your instructions, you shouldn't be surprised if many students reply by nodding their heads and . . . not doing as instructed. Even if your students are higher level, demonstrating instructions will always save time in the end.

Keep it Simple

Have you ever asked for directions and been given a rapid-fire list of landmarks and turns? It’s possible your activity instructions sound like that to your students. When introducing a new task, activity or game, it’s best to keep instructions to a minimum. This doesn’t mean leaving vital information out but rather keeping the necessary steps simple. Over time, new steps can be added to a familiar activity for variation or interest.  Again, you know your students. If they have stronger language skills, or are receiving instructions in the L1, you can have a bit more leeway here.

Smaller is Better

Very often, conversation classes will have numbers far in excess of practical conversation with the whole class. You never see everyone at a party speaking in one group, because it simply isn’t practical. Some feel that groups should be divided according to ability: high-level students together, etc. Others see the benefit of mixed level groups: the higher ones can assist the lower ones and strengthen their own abilities in the process. For me, having students speak with as many different people as possible is the key. They get the best of both worlds: speaking with peers at their level and assisting some students, and being assisted by others.

Teach Speaking Strategies

Think about how much time is spent teaching students reading strategies. Have you spent equal time on speaking strategies, such as circumlocution, or talking around an unknown word?

Strategies can generally be broken down into two types: avoidance and compensation. Avoidance can range from phonological to topical. Students probably employ this to a certain extent naturally. If they are aware of a gap in their abilities, they simply avoid exposing that gap, whether it's difficulty making a certain sound or the vocabulary needed to speak about a given topic.

A better alternative is compensation: using various techniques to get by and communicate despite a gap. These simple tips can pay great dividends for your students in their real world conversations. The most basic are fillers (um, you know, etc.) and asking for repetition. Other common strategies include circumlocution, as well as approximation or word coinage, both of which involve nearly having the word, but using a related term or making a new word which gets the meaning across (tennis bat, rather than tennis racquet.)

While these seem obvious to us since we use them even in our native language, many language learners are reluctant to employ the same techniques in their second language. So, they not only need to be explicitly taught but also practiced so students feel comfortable using them.

Make Expectations Clear

Are you evaluating the students? If so, on what: participation, fluency, accuracy or all of the above? While some students may be there for their own enjoyment and edification, most are required to be there and just want a grade so they can move on to the next level. A rubric which you explain and give examples to demonstrate will make your requirements clear.

Most teachers will discuss their grading methods on the first day and then never mention them again, but you should review them periodically over the term, particularly when giving a new assignment. If students are expected to speak X% of the class, remind them each day.

Minimize Teacher Talk Time

I once attended a three-day seminar with a famous language instructor/text book author. He didn’t speak for about an hour into the first day because he was teaching by demonstrating. I think that’s a bit extreme, and have certainly had a number of students who would claim ignorance rather than take the initiative to start an activity on their own. However, he made a good point—teachers tend to think students need far more direction than they actually do. Give them what they need, no more, no less.

A Word about Classroom Management

Many teachers think rules and rewards are the beginning and end of classroom management, but there's a lot more to it. Classroom management largely has to do with organization. A well-run class has systems in place to make it as efficient as possible with the fewest tears. Students need everything to be laid out clearly for them. They may be very familiar with another teacher’s procedures, but those may quite different from yours. This includes rules and rewards, but also classroom procedures (homework collection, transitions, lining up, etc.). This can seem time-consuming, but implementing these things can reduce frustration the rest of the term.

What I really wish I had known or been told when I first started teaching was the importance of having and modeling procedures. I now have procedures for everything: bathroom/ water, collecting homework, getting my attention, getting the class’ attention, before class, transitions from one task to another, packing up, lining up, etc. Really-every single thing I do has a procedure. I demonstrate each one to the class and we practice together. If needed during the semester,