Sentence paterns make writing English a breeze.
Below are two free down loadable worksheets I put together for my first grade class. They are a mix of the three sentence patterns we have been working on this unit.
Classroom surveys are a great way to get your students speaking “authentic” English.
Amazingly enough, for the first time this year my first, second and third graders are all working on the same theme at the same time.
The worksheets I created are available for download. Just right click your mouse and click “save as.”
Fruit and vegetable class survey – Use this Word document to get the students speaking and writing English. Class surveys are always a hit. Just be sure to monitor them closely, to make sure everyone is using English. Typically, I have them write the sentences and that usually generates spontaneous conversations about spelling and grammar.
What do you want to eat? – Use this Word document to get students used to using new food vocabulary. You decide on which vocabulary words you want your students to focus on – the worksheet is divided up into categories. The students ask their classmates a simple question and they fill in the blank. I deliberately doubled it up so you can cut the paper in half and then have the students use their own notebook paper to write the sentences.
The activities are built right into the PowerPoint. Bring some some extra paper along so you can create the menus and make sure the kids bring their notebooks and crayons with them too.
This year our Winter camp will be held in another building far away from the new campus, so we don’t have access to a copier. Fortunately, we will bring the LED projectors with us, so I decided to put everything on PowerPoints, instead of handouts.
Below are the three PowerPoints I used for camp. They don’t have to be exclusively used for Winter camp. Take a look at them and see if they could be useful to you…
Winter Camp 1.1 – This PowerPoint reviews when to use before and after, ordering food, descriptive food words and a few conversational activities that can also be used as writing assignments. I’ve thrown in a creative writing assignment too. The kids have to create their own menus. I’ve provided a sample Mexican menu on one of the slides, but you will have to search for your own Italian menu or use Luigi’s Italian menu instead. After the menus are done, they take turns placing their order. While one pretends to be the waiter, the other one places their order.
Winter Camp 1.2- This PowerPoint has lots of grammar and conversation exercises, as well as, a classroom survey. Everything is built right into the presentation. All the students need is a piece of paper, a pencil and an eraser.
Winter Camp 1.3- This short PowerPoint reviews some simple grammar and requires the student to identify several activities within a paragraph.
Wacky English Conversation Starters
Check this out. I created these silly conversation starters that you can use to get your class talking. It is geared toward middle school students and up. You can download the powerpoint if you have access to a LED projector. If you don’t, don’t sweat it. You can print them out as “cards.” Go to the print option and select the option that allows you to print each slide as a separate tile. Then pair up your students and pass out the “cards.” In order for this to be a well rounded lesson, be sure to incorporate reading, writing, listening and speaking. You can achive this goal by instructing the students to read the card aloud while their counter part listens. Then the students write their response and share it with their partner (and the class too - if time permits.)
If, for some reason you can’t download it click here and it will take you to the Teachers-Pay-Teachers site where you can download it for free.
Baby Santa Penguin
Click here for a link to Purina All Stars, a video archive of animals. Watching these short video clips with your students will make great discussion starters.
Put on the board questions like:
If you scroll down and look to the left side, you will see tabs for other pages – wildlife, meow, woof, odd couples, little critters and more.
Below is a list of more animal videos. I suggest previewing and downloading the videos before showing them in class ( just to make sure that there are no glitches and nothing inappropriate pops up on the screen – the videos tend to load one right after the other.)
If you don’t have Real Player, click here and download the free version.
Looking for a virtually inexhaustible resource for ESL conversation questions? Well, look no farther than here. Our good friends at The Internet TESOL Journal have a large database of questions. They are alphabetically organized by topics such as – annoying things, tipping and major American holidays.
The wonderful people over at ESL Gold have a page that is dedicated to Phrases for Conversation which are broken down into the following levels: Low Beginning, High Beginning, Low Intermediate, High Intermediate & Advanced. What makes this site stand out above the others is that it provides audio. The speakers are native North American speakers and they speak slow enough for the ELL (English Language Learner) to pick up on what they are saying, but not so mind numbingly slow that you want to bang your head against the wall. Also, you can tell the narrators are some what professional because the inflection is in the right place, even if it does sound somewhat forced on some of the examples. This would be a great site for Chinese teachers of English to brush up on their English skills, assign as homework or use as part of a language lab.