All You Need is Paper (and a little love) ESL/EFL activities

This is something kids love to do. Plus, it's veeery easy to prepare. Guess what you need to do it... that's right, Paper! Oh, and a pen which can't be that hard for you to find somewhere. :) Well, here goes. Get some of the vocabulary your students are practicing and write one word on the top right hand corner of a sheet of paper. I recently did this with clothes, so I wrote pants, dress, gloves, shirt and shoes, one word on five different sheets and taped them up in different parts of the room. You can add more words to my list and even do this with actions like: swimming, sleeping etc. Next, tell your students you're going to be playing a song which they have to get up and dance to till you stop the music. When the music stops they have to run to one of the papers and draw whatever's written on the sheet. Give them a minute or two to draw and then start the music again. I usually make sure everyone has had a chance to draw each word. You can keep these up ar

Here's something I tried in two different classes with completely different grammar points. All you need is a blank sheet of paper for each student and a marker to write on the board. The first group of students I did this with was a group of teenagers. We were studying conditional sentences, first conditional to be exact. I projected eight phrases on the board which they would have to complete, for example: If it's sunny on Saturday, ... I then asked them to fold their sheets 3 times right in the middle so that when they opened the sheet there would be eight squares made from the creases created by folding the paper. They were then instructed to complete the sentences, one per square, but not to copy the first part of the sentence only write the part they had thought of. They were also told not to write the continuation of the phrases in order but in random squares. Maybe writing the first one in the last square, the second one in a middle square and so on. When they were

Poetry. Not an easy topic for most people, especially if you want students to write one. And writing a poem in a second language may be even scarier. So, today I got a class of advanced students to "find" poems. I saw this idea on Pinterest which is a paradise for teachers looking for new ideas for the classroom. All you need for this activity is paper. Well, not really, all you need is an old book. I had a book lying around the house that I didn't really care for. After discussing what they thought a poem was, I gave them each a page from the book and asked them to "find" their poem. These poems are called "Found Poems".  After they had created their poems, I collected them, mixed them up and handed them out again at random. They were then supposed to read the poem they had gotten, think about what it meant, then, find the student/author who had written it and discuss if what they understood was what the person had actually meant. The were exci