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

  Here's a really creative activity plus craft to practice places in the city and the use of there is/are. Students have to create 3 layers of their city by adding 3 different paper levels. The first buildings are drawn and colored on a sheet of paper, cut out and glued onto the blue creative paper which should be cut in half. The other 2 levels with the smaller buildings and the cars on the street have to be longer strips of paper than the blue one so they can be glued by their tips onto the first paper. After the city is ready, students should write about their city and glue it onto the back of the blue paper. Each student can show and describe their city to the class. The cities can also be placed around the classroom (we hope next year) for everybody to be able to check out and read about their friends' cities. Encourage students to be creative with their cities and only use yours for inspiration.                       ...

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.

This was an art project I did with my bilingual 4th grade class. We had been studying communities and they had to paint a cityscape but we did it with a twist. First, the students cut pieces of masking tape and taped them on a paper. Each piece of tape had a different size. Then, each student chose a color to paint their paper or rather city sky. The following class when the paint had dried, we peeled off the tape. It's best of you peel off the tape from top to bottom so the paint doesn't come off, too. So, now you have white rectangles of different sizes with a painted background. Students filled in the rectangles with windows and doors to make the city buildings. They also added airplanes, antennas and other details to their cities. Last, we glued their cities onto black creative paper for a more dramatic effect. At the end, you can have your students describe their cities to their friends, either in pairs or to the whole class. I love color and thought the final resu...