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

 Last days of class and everything is Christmasy! I used paint and markers to liven up my students' paper portfolio envelopes with a holly ribbon. The kids loved them! They then added their own Christmas theme decorations to their portfolios. We also made holiday bookmarks which were pretty easy to make with leftover craft paper from the year. And look who I got to take a picture with at the mall! 🎄

I had only one fifth grade student on the last day of class 😊 I had already planned on making a Christmas card with them so I told her we would make cards together. We first folded and cut a red piece of paper like the white paper in the photo. We laid the sheet flat out on the table and drew a wiggly line at the top to be the wire for the Christmas lights, We dipped our fingers in different colored paint to make the lights and while the paint was drying, we cut out 3 green triangles, each one just a little bit smaller than the other. We glued them together, added the sequins, and then glued the tree onto the cut out part of the red paper leaving just enough space to draw the tree trunk.  We added snow with a white pencil and then wrote Merry Christmas. I'm sure if I had more students they would have been creative with the details. We both ejoyed this Christmas card moment together and it was nice to talk as we worked and get to know her better.    

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.