ESL Jigsaws
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Viewing entries tagged with 'ESOL'
Simple Halloween Lesson for Low Beginners
Halloween can be disconcerting for new immigrants and refugees who may not understand what it's all about. An important role for ESL teachers is helping students crack our cultural code.
News Articles for Intermediate Students
Stroke victims often suffer from aphasia, a condition that can result in anything from occasional trouble finding words to completely losing the ability to speak or read or write. Intelligence is unaffected.
Simple Earth Day Lesson for Low Beginners
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.
Intermediate Level Personal Information
Filling in forms is one of the most common activities English language learning students have to do outside the classroom. It's a mistake to assume once students reach the intermediate level they have fully mastered the language required for those tasks.
Reading on a Thrift Store Business Model
Thrift stores are becoming more popular with middle aged clothes shoppers. Seems if you don't want to wear yoga attire to work, thrift stores are some of the best sources for clothing made from a wider variety of fabrics.
Soft Skills: Small Talk About the Weather
Over the years I've had numerous students say they've been turned down after job interviews because they lacked local experience. If having worked locally were a prerequisite for the job, would their resumés not have precluded them from even getting the interview? More likely the experience referred to is related not to quantifiable hard skills but rather to more intangible soft skills that enable a person to "fit in", such as knowledge of local language and the ability to engage in small talk.
Christmas Reading for Low Beginners
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.)
Go and Went Grammar Errors
Anyone who has taught grammar in a beginner level ESL or EFL class knows that the speed and accuracy with which students complete grammar worksheets is only very weakly correlated with their ability to use the given grammatical structure later in their own speech.
A Fun Way to Teach Body Parts
Jigsaws aren’t the only cooperative learning activity that I do in my classroom. Here is a fun activity for reviewing body parts. I divide the class into groups of three and give each group a sheet of chart paper and a felt marker. I ask the students to take turns being the artist.
Teaching the Alphabet: Literacy 101
Adult literacy students range from pre-literate to non-literate to semi-literate to those from non-Roman alphabets. I've had some students who did not know how to hold a pencil. I've had others who had no idea when their birthday was because they came from cultures where no one knew dates or years. But the majority of literacy students I've had came from non-Roman alphabets and had some knowledge of the English alphabet. Some even knew the names of all the letters of the alphabet, but had little knowledge of the sounds of any letters. Trouble writing on the line, confusion between upper and lower case and some letters backwards or reversed are all clues that a student may fit in this category of students.
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Recent Blog Posts
- Intermediate Reading Lesson on Hoarding
- Victoria Day Reading for Low Beginners
- Earth Day
- Correcting Name Pronunciation
- Earth HOUR for Low Beginners
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- Valentine's Day Reading for Low Beginners
- Review Games for Christmas
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- Simple Geography Vocabulary Speaking Game
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- Canadian Statutory Holidays Reading Lesson for Beginners
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- Low Beginner Name Introductions
- Intermediate Name Introductions
- New Year's Reading for Low Beginners
- Boxing Day Reading for Low Beginners
- Simple Halloween Lesson for Low Beginners
- News Articles for Intermediate Students
- What it Means to be Canadian
- Simple Earth Day Lesson for Low Beginners
- Having Fun with New Canada Jigsaws CLB 5-6
- Field Testing Has Begun For New Canada Jigsaws!
- Intermediate Level Personal Information
- Canada Day Fun with Maps
- Teaching About Victoria Day
- Reading on a Thrift Store Business Model
- Soft Skills: Small Talk About the Weather
- Christmas Reading for Low Beginners
- Classroom Word Search Using English Directionality
- Make Canada Study Come Alive
- Go and Went Grammar Errors
- A Fun Way to Teach Body Parts
- Teaching the Alphabet: Literacy 101