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

Made this very simple snow scene with reindeer and snowmen with my third-graders. I had seen a video on Instagram explaining how to make the characters and decided to add the background, so the kids could take them home to decorate their house for Christmas. All you have to do is draw the Christmas characters you like, cut them out, and glue them onto a plastic bottle top, add some Play-Doh to the bottom of the bottle top, so the characters stand up, and you're done. The pictures are pretty self-explanatory. They wobble to the sides when you push them The background is black paper folded to stand. I've shown this here in other posts, but instead of a triangle, I made a square. For the snow, I just cut up white paper into little pieces, placed small drops of glue onto the paper, and threw the paper on it. I also added little Christmas lights at the top. Students were able to look at my model and work on their own, which is always a plus.  

  For my third-graders to illustrate a story, we made finger-painted sheep. They first used white paint to make the sheep, and while the paint was drying, they wrote what happened first, next, then, and finally in the story. We came up with the sequence together as a group. I wrote their ideas on the board for them to copy on notebook paper. When they were done, they drew the head and legs of the sheep on black paper, cut them out, and glued them to the bodies. They also glued googly eyes onto the head. One other thing some students did was to add a small slip of folded paper on the back of the head, so it would stick out a little. I always love the fact that each one comes out different, even though the idea is the same. In the following class, they each used their work to practice reading.