ESL Jigsaws

By popular demand, this non-jigsaw, low beginner Canadian holidays book is aimed at literacy and CLB 1. Focusing on commonly known information on holidays, each reading text has pictures to assist with vocabulary comprehension. 

Visit the Beginner Sample Lessons page to view an Earth Day story from this book. Scroll down to view some pages from the book. 

The profile of the learner is a student with limited knowledge of the English alphabet and a very small vocabulary. Copying accurately can be a challenge and the letters "l" and "I" are often confused. Listening proves challenging as students struggle to distinguish where one word ends and the next begins. Considerable repetition is required for vocabulary retention. 

Callan's Canadian Holidays for Low Beginner ESL makes use of word clouds for word recognition, word searches for spelling practice and bingo games for vocabulary retention. Listening clozes end each unit. CDs are available. 

Written exercises focus on plurals, capitalization, imperatives, third person singular and short answers with "be", "do" and "can".

For each book's CLB levels, click here. Click here for how to order the book.

You will use this book all year round. Holidays included in this book are:

January: New Year's

February: Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day

March: St. Patrick's Day, Easter

April: Earth Day

May: Mother's Day, Victoria Day

June: Father's Day

July: Canada Day

September: Labour Day

October: Thanksgiving, Halloween

November: Remembrance Day

December: Christmas 

Click here to order:

Here are some, not all, of the pages from the Mother's Day unit. The unit combines Mother's Day with study of daily routines. 

This unit has eight distinct BINGO cards to reinforce daily routines. Here are two:

Each lesson begins with a word cloud to acquaint students with the upcoming vocabularly and all units have a story with visual support and a cloze passage. Other than that, each unit is completely different. Here are a couple pages from the Father's Day unit below:

Check out a few pages from the Victoria Day unit below: