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

 Here's an activity I did with my adult group. These are basic learners, and we're studying parts of a house. I found some pictures of rooms on the internet and placed them on my class slides. I didn't let them see the slides and told them I would describe a specific room in a house, and they would have to draw it. After they finished drawing the room, they compared their rooms to see if they were alike. In pairs, they talked about their rooms: there's a bed and next to the bed there's a side table, etc. Last, I showed them the picture of the room on the slide, and we all made sentences together. We forget that adults can and like to draw and have fun too. 

Remember these? I guess we can use them at any age because my basic adult group used them successfully to practice colors, spelling, and asking and answering questions. After the whole class watched a step-by-step video to learn how to make the fortune-tellers, they colored 4 of the outside squares using different colors. They then wrote 8 different topics on the inside and a question under each topic. In pairs, one student chose a color and the other student had to spell the color as they opened and closed the fortune-teller. Finally, they picked a topic and asked and answered the question on that topic. These are something that can be used in the following classes as a wrap-up and review activity. Adults should also be able to make things and bring out the child that exists in all of us.  

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...