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

 Every time my first-graders finish a unit, I send all their work home from that unit along with a progress report in a big brown envelope. I usually glue some activity they did on the cover of the envelope but this time I decided to do something different. Since we're studying parts of a house and cities, I had them use different colors of paint on a square sponge to stamp their envelope creating houses and buildings on which they later added windows, doors and other details. I also had them write the sentence, I live in Brasilia. I believe I'll keep doing something like this in the future, so they have one more activity to show their families.

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...

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...