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

 In Brazil, we're all coming back from our summer vacations. We usually have photos and memories of our trips and holidays on our phones, right? So I thought that a great way for students to share what they did is to get them to make a paper cell phone, draw a picture of their vacation on one side, and write about it on the back. We used thin pieces of cardboard from cereal boxes and then glued their paper phones on the cardboard They can then share their stories and drawings with the class. I had my 5th graders pass their paper phones around and everyone got to read about what their classmates did. I guess these phones can be allowed in class. 😉

    My second-graders recently created colorful Chinese New Year dragons using paper. As we were learning about different family traditions and holidays celebrated around the world, I provided them with pre-cut dragon heads and slips of paper, and they used their creativity to glue the pieces onto black paper along a line I had drawn. If time allows, in the future, I would love for the students to cut their own paper and draw their own lines to encourage more independent production. The black paper really made the colors of their dragons stand out! In the following class, the students also wrote 'Happy New Year' on the black paper using white pens or pencils

My second graders are still studying and talking about what families can do together. One of the topics we covered is that families celebrate holidays together. So, we talked about New Year's and watching fireworks. They wrote: Families celebrate holidays together. They then could illustrate their sentence with paper fireworks made from colorful strips of paper. We all were truely excited with the results.  

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.