ESL Jigsaws

Christmas Reading for Low Beginners

Posted by Nancy Callan on 4 December 2013 | 3 Comments

Tags: Christmas, reading, low beginner, literacy, sentence strips, worksheet, questions, ELL, ESL, EFL, ESOL, ENL

The Christmas story below is geared for literacy and low beginner ELL students. It is adapted from Callan’s Canadian Holidays for Low Beginner ESL, but is suitable for use in America as well. Further low beginner exercises on Christmas, with pictures, are found in that book. An audio CD and cloze exercise are also available. (For free material for mid-beginner or intermediate level, check out my blog post on Christmas from last year, here. Or why not try a jigsaw lesson for Christmas? Check out Callan's Holiday Jigsaws.)

For this exercise, you will need a few pairs of scissors as students are to read the story, cut it up, put it back together and read it again. This exercise reinforces both the left to right directionality and syntax of English. It also gives students at this low level the much needed opportunity to practice reading the story several times. Click on the image to view it large on your computer and print it out for use in your own class.

This reading exercise is followed by a worksheet requiring students to make questions by filling in the question word, either  who, what, when or where. Short answers are supplied. After you’ve taken it up, have students practice asking and answering the questions in pairs. You can then have one student read the question from the sheet and the other answer from memory, without looking at the sheet. Let me know how it works.