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

Here’s a game young learners can make and play to practice numbers, how many, there is/there are, colors, vocabulary words bees beetles flowers and have fun trying to balance bugs on a flower.                 

This easy to make paper giraffe can be used to practice the superlative or the comparative. After you roll the paper up to make a cone, you have to cut the base to make it stand up, so each giraffe ends up being a different height. I had my class line up their giraffes and we measured them up to see which one was the tallest. They also made sentences using the comparative saying that their giraffe was taller, shorter, bigger or smaller than a friend's giraffe. Tomorrow, I'm making this giraffe with my second grade group to illustrate a story about a giraffe and to practice the names of wild animals. You can use orange or yellow paper or they can even color white paper.

A Mystery Box is always a great way to grab young learners' attention. I decorated a box I already had at home and it worked perfectly to hide the wild animals I had made. Since it seems we'll be quarenteaching for a while still, we have to find ways to use what we have at home to help us reach our students. Luckily, kids are naturally curious and enjoy guessing games so they'll be excited about participating. Making videos for our students also help us better explain and illustrate what we are teaching.  I made this video to review the names of the animals and having them try to guess which animal is in the box is a natural way to get them to repeat the vocabulary. In one of my groups, each student made their own Mystery Box. They placed different objects in their boxes and described the objects for the class to guess.  My box and their boxes can be used again and again with objects to introduce or review a theme. It’s fascinating to see how each box turns out.

This is an activity I plan to do when I get back to a real-life classroom. You separate the class in groups of 4. Each person in the group uses a white square paper to draw a scene where different animals live. I made an ocean, a forest, a farm and a house. The students then have to come up with 6 names of animals that live in the scene they are drawing. The group can work as a team to come up with the names. You can see my scenes and animal names in the photos. Students assemble the standing triangle , which I have shown here in other activities, and glue all 4 scenes together.   The teacher collects all the different sceneries and hands them out to different groups so that each group is going to use another groups' sceneries to play. When the teacher says GO, each group has to place the names of the animals in the correct scene. Some animals can be used in 2 different scenes, fish for example, but you can only have 6 names in each scene. The first group to place the names of the

One of my classes was studying numbers from 10 to 100. I asked them to pick their favorite 2 digit number which didn’t include zero, draw, color and decorate it, and then cut the numbers out, glue them onto a thicker paper, tape them onto sticks and see how many numbers they could make using the two numbers they had. My favorite number was 36, so I was also able to make 63, 93 and 39.  Each student shared their numbers with the class, so they had to say and listen to quite a few numbers. For more practice, you could ask them to tell you which number comes before or after each number.

All you need is one sheet of creative paper to make this cat. First, fold the paper in half. Draw the arch in the middle, cut and use one part of the paper you cut out for the ears and tail and the other part for the head. Then just get creative with the details.  I had my class send me a photo of their cat around the house, on the couch, the bed or a table, in the bedroom or living room. I used their pictures the following class to ask: Where's John's cat? and had them give me complete answers. One mother filled a wall with the cats with speech bubbles singing our hello song. So sweet and cute. 💓💓💓

Here's a video of me teaching how to make a paper house. I've used this house with young learners and teens in different ways. In one class, they made the house and named the parts of the house. In another class, students were studying countable and uncountable words. They made the house into a supermarket and had to separate the market into 2 sides. On one side, they had to draw only countable objects and on the other side uncountable objects. I paired this group up and had them ask each other questions using there is and there are to discover what was in their partner's market.

We are learning about parts of the house and where certain objects of the house belong. My first grade class was able to make this paper couch by following step by step instructions from my Google Slides and I also did it along with them. This is couch is made the same way I made the bed from this post . They each presented their couches and I asked them where the couch is in their house. I asked them questions about the colors and how many cushions they placed on their couch as well. One student is using the couch for her tiny dolls. 😊                                                                               

This dog was really simple to make. My first grade bilingual group was learning about how they could help around the house. One of the chores was give the dog a bath. We made the dog in one class and the bathtub the following class. When both are ready, all you have to do to give the dog a bath is place him on the paper with the drawing of the tub. They are going to show their complete project and I’ll ask them, how can we help around the house? I expect them to answer I can wash the dog or I can give the dog a bath. There is a lot of vocabulary to practice with this simple project. After 3 months of online classes, this group still gets excited about making these paper activities. Can’t wait to get back to our classroom to see them in person ❤️