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

                In August, my first grade class will be studying pets. I found some simple ideas for using corks to paint on Pinterest. Kids use the corks and paint  to stamp circles on a white sheet and complete the animals using a paintbrush or a pen. These animals can be cut out and glued onto bottle caps to produce other activities. You can have the students add or subtract animals. See how many animals there are altogether. You can use them to help students practice making or completing patterns.The animlas can also be used to play Tic-Tac-Toe. When they play, each time they place an animal, they have to say its name.  It's great to see how just one craft activity can be so flexible.

I made a story for my students on Google Slides and then made a shorter version of the story using iMovie. The only thing that wasn’t paper were the fireflies. My paper story is about an easygoing snail. I hope you can use it in your class or even better that it motivates you to create your own story using paper. Making a story can also become a class project. I spent one whole day doing everything but since I'm still quarantined, I've had more time. An interesting activity for older students who are at an intermediate or advanced level is to show them a character and let them create a story or a comic strip with that character. Well, here’s Shelby .

This is an activity to be done in a classroom but which can be easily adapted to online classes. In a classroom, you can tape papers like these with different letters of the alphabet for fast finishers. When they are done with an activity, let them pick a word from the little brown bag and draw it. If they don’t know the meaning of the word, let them ask a friend or look it up. The little brown bag can be made with a toilet paper roll. Write around 10 words on slips of paper and place them in the little bag. The letter can be written on a small piece of creative paper and glued on. To adapt the activity to online classes, you can use Wordwall to make a wheel which students spin. Add letters to the wheel, whichever letter the wheel stops on, students have to draw an object which begins with that letter.

Weather vocabulary is always taught in EFL classes, no mater the age. I made some paper props to use with my students in my classes, slides and in my videos. The cactuses I made on white paper with markers and crayons and glued them onto cardboard to make them last longer. The cactus flower is a bottle cap glued onto the cactus. The rain is made from Q-tips.  I always have my students tell me at the beginning of the class how the weather is. Many times now with our online classes, they'll take their phones or tablets to their windows and show my how the day looks from their house or apartment. How's the weather over where you are now?

Unboxing videos are all over the Web, so I decided to make my own unboxing video to show my students on the first day after our break. I collected things I did on my time off to share with my class on their first day back. I only wrote the word  unboxing  on the box so I could use the box again with other topics. The words  my vacation  can be taped on and then taken off and replaced.  If we were in a live classroom, I’d do the unboxing in the classroom but since we’re still online, I thought a video would be best. I asked them to create their own vacation unboxing vídeos to share with the class. Let’s hope they do! .

So, my second grade class is studying adjectives to describe animals. It was pretty easy for them to make this spider at home just by following instructions from my slides. I still couldn't convince them though that spiders are scary.                             

Inspired by our caterpillars, I made this fruit toss game out of a box I got at the supermarket. I used a tea box to make the fruit and glued bottle caps onto them to make them easier to throw. I decorated the box with my caterpillar and more fruit and added a question I wanted students to be able to answer. The students have to be able to toss the fruit into the hole at the top of the box which is supposed to be the caterpillar's mouth. They have to count how many fruit they were able to get into the hole and tell the class. I showed the game to my goup and invited  them to make one themselves with their families. I'm saving mine to take to school and play with my class when we all finally go back.

I'm guessing that if you teach kids, you are familiar with the story of the hungry caterpillar. If you are not, you can easily find the book or the video on the Internet. After  my class listened to the story, I taught them how to make their own paper caterpillars. They each added their own touch to it and they all came out unique. It's an activity you can easily do even if you are teaching online which is still my case. At the end of the class, each student shared their caterpillar and told the class what it ate.

                      My first grade class is studying food and learning where it belongs in a market. I showed them a story about a dinosaur called Penelope who goes to school and eats her classmates. It's a funny story and they loved it. After the story, we all made our own dinosaurs and in its mouth, we each drew what we thought it should eat. My dinosaur had an egg, a strawberry, a slice of cheese, some bread and a tomato. I guess it's a pretty healthy dinosaur. Next class, each student is going to tell me what their dinosaur eats.