ESL Jigsaws

Simple Earth Day Lesson for Low Beginners

Posted by Nancy Callan on 7 April 2016 | 2 Comments

Tags: Earth Day, ENL, ESOL, CLB 1, LINC, environment, reading, vocabulary matching, strip story, do you questions

Who says you can't teach about Earth Day in low beginner ESL? Earth Day is a great time to discuss things we can do to live a more sustainable lifestyle and to practice simple "Do you" questions with low beginner students. 

Here is a lesson I created for a LINC 1 class that should be suitable for any low beginner class. If it's not right for your level, perhaps you could send a link of this page on to another teacher who might be able to use it. Teachers are free to copy it for their own classroom use.  

I'm a big fan of cutting things up and having students put them back together. I start the lesson by having students practice the vocabulary with a matching exercise:

Then they read the story, cut it up, put it back together, and read it again. And again. My low level students do a lot of things over and over:

Then they answer some "Do You" questions and practice asking and answering the questions with classmates:

Then students fill in the cloze exercise, which is identical to the story they have read and practiced putting back together. You can have students close their books and listen to you read the story or they can do it as a copying exercise, which can be quite challenging for very low level ESL.

Click on one of the images to view the exercise and print it out to use in your own class. Let me know how it works. For a more substantial, slightly higher level low beginner unit on Earth Day, check out Callan's Canadian Holidays for Low Beginner ESL. A sample of the Earth Day story can be seen here. 

Let me know how it goes. Keep in touch with me on Twitter @ESLjigsaws