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

 I guess you can tell which story this is. That's right, my 5th graders read an adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk. We were studying the sequence of a story and they had to answer two questions about the story and then had to complete a chart with what happened first, next, then, and finally . I thought the chart was somewhat dull so I asked them to draw a part of the beanstalk and write their answers and the sequence on the leaves of the beanstalk. I thought the process and the outcome was a lot more memorable and also pleasing to the eyes. Some students even got creative and added some 3D paper butterflies. Love how the same activity always comes out different and shows each child's personality.

  For my third-graders to illustrate a story, we made finger-painted sheep. They first used white paint to make the sheep, and while the paint was drying, they wrote what happened first, next, then, and finally in the story. We came up with the sequence together as a group. I wrote their ideas on the board for them to copy on notebook paper. When they were done, they drew the head and legs of the sheep on black paper, cut them out, and glued them to the bodies. They also glued googly eyes onto the head. One other thing some students did was to add a small slip of folded paper on the back of the head, so it would stick out a little. I always love the fact that each one comes out different, even though the idea is the same. In the following class, they each used their work to practice reading.