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

Lots of fish in the sea! In this activity, my second-graders first added some drops of light and dark blue paint on one side of a sheet of paper and then folded the paper in the middle to make the ocean background for their fish. While the paint was drying, they drew their fish on a magazine page. I gave them many colorful circles to fold in the middle and glue onto their fish to be the scales and one googly eye. After the paint had dried and they had cut out their fish, they wrote that fish can swim and have tails and then glued their fish onto the ocean paper. The following class, each student came to the front of the class to share their fish and read their sentence.  I always love that although they are all doing the same activity, each one comes out just a little bit different. 🐟  

Kids love a guessing game! I'll be using this activity to review pet names. I'm having a student pick a color and then a number. They have to guess which pet is behind the door. If they guess correctly, they get a star. After we play, they can choose any pet and make their own door for the rest of the class to guess. I used 3 sheets of creative paper cut in the middle. This way, I was able to make 2 doors with each paper. I drew the pets on white paper, cut them out, and glued them in the doors after I had already drawn the doors and made the details. I didn't draw a cat and a dog because these are the easiest ones and we had made cats and dogs in other classes. I glued all the doors onto a piece of cardboard, so I can hold them all up at the same time for students to easily see. I really liked the final result and how all the colors look together.  

This is an activity I plan to do when I get back to a real-life classroom. You separate the class in groups of 4. Each person in the group uses a white square paper to draw a scene where different animals live. I made an ocean, a forest, a farm and a house. The students then have to come up with 6 names of animals that live in the scene they are drawing. The group can work as a team to come up with the names. You can see my scenes and animal names in the photos. Students assemble the standing triangle , which I have shown here in other activities, and glue all 4 scenes together.   The teacher collects all the different sceneries and hands them out to different groups so that each group is going to use another groups' sceneries to play. When the teacher says GO, each group has to place the names of the animals in the correct scene. Some animals can be used in 2 different scenes, fish for example, but you can only have 6 names in each scene. The first group to place the names of...

Here’s a great theme for young learners! There’s so much you can explore and create. My kids started with boats and then today we made cars. Of course, paper was our material of choice. Our sea needed fish and our boats needed sails and some decorations. Our cars will drive through the streets of the big floor map we’re going to make and play with next class.