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

Today I worked with a group of adults who were lower intermediate or maybe high beginners. Well, feel free to name them whatever you want. The topic of the class was places in a city, there is/there are and can. The tricky part was that I had 4 hours with them. So, after the usual homework correction, I explored some pictures with them of some common places in a city. After they showed me they had understood all the vocabulary, I asked them to draw their own cities in groups of 4. They had to draw some but not all of the places mentioned in the book. One of the good things was that they asked a lot of questions and came up with a lot of words on their own. When they were done, each group had to present their city to the class using there is, there are and the negatives: there’s no or there aren’t any . Everybody in the group was supposed to say at least 2 sentences about their city, most said more. They also had to make up a name for their town. After their presentation, I gave t

Asking students to correctly put the lines from a dialogue in order is nothing new, so I added a sentence which was not from the original dialogue to give it a twist. I divided my group of teens into 3 and gave them each the lines of the dialogue all in the same color. They had just a few minutes to order the lines and discover the odd one out. They all then compared their answers and noticed their odd lines were different but they were right. I had written different wrong lines for each group. When they were done comparing, I asked them why they had chosen their specific sentence and why it didn’t fit in. Last, we listened to the dialogue as they followed along with their lines.