Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans: Teaching ESL, #1
    English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans: Teaching ESL, #1
    English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans: Teaching ESL, #1
    Ebook256 pages2 hours

    English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans: Teaching ESL, #1

    By Greg Strandberg

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    They’re bored, they’re tired, and they’d rather be anywhere else. That’s no way to teach an ESL class, and no way to spend your time teaching abroad. So why not get things moving and shaking with something they actually like for a change?

    You can do just that with English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans. Make your ESL class the most popular in school today with 101 lesson ideas presented with 112 pictures to help explain them.

    Your students will love you, and your time as an ESL teacher will finally be headache-free. So toss out that ESL textbook and burn those boring English grammar sheets. Let your class find out why learning English Rocks!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGreg Strandberg
    Release dateApr 21, 2013
    ISBN9781301796649
    English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans: Teaching ESL, #1
    Author

    Greg Strandberg

    Greg Strandberg was born and raised in Helena, Montana. He graduated from the University of Montana in 2008 with a BA in History.When the American economy began to collapse Greg quickly moved to China, where he became a slave for the English language industry. After five years of that nonsense he returned to Montana in June, 2013.When not writing his blogs, novels, or web content for others, Greg enjoys reading, hiking, biking, and spending time with his wife and young son.

    Read more from Greg Strandberg

    Related to English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans

    Titles in the series (8)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Reading & Phonics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Find Your Inner Swot

      Aug 1, 2022

      Find Your Inner Swot
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Floating Classroom

      Mar 14, 2017

      The Floating Classroom
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Platinum Rule

      Dec 14, 2020

      The Platinum Rule
      2 min read

    • Article

      Back To School

      Aug 11, 2019

      Back To School
      7 min read

    • Article

      7 STUDY RULES That Will Help Your Kids

      Sep 7, 2020

      When students are attempting to absorb large amounts of information, especially when swotting for a test, some engage in a practice called cramming. This often involves staying up very late and going over the material repeatedly, often by just typi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Classroom Capers

      Dec 15, 2023

      Classroom Capers
      9 min read

    • Article

      How to win THE HOMEWORK WAR

      Mar 16, 2020

      How to win THE HOMEWORK WAR
      4 min read

    • Article

      Back TO SCHOOL COOL

      Feb 4, 2021

      Think about what you’d like to achieve this year. Do you want the best grades? Do you want to make some new friends? How will you make these things happen? Write down a list of your goals for 2021 and put it in a place you will always see it. The lis

      2 min read

    • Article

      Hack Your Study Sesh

      Sep 1, 2019

      Hack Your Study Sesh
      3 min read

    • Article

      Denver’s Teachers

      Jun 26, 2020

      Denver’s Teachers
      2 min read

    • Article

      Learning Curve

      Jan 26, 2020

      Learning Curve
      2 min read

    • Article

      Those Who Can... Teach

      Oct 29, 2019

      Those Who Can... Teach
      7 min read

    • Article

      House Of Cards

      Sep 1, 2020

      House Of Cards
      2 min read

    • Article

      Forget What They Taught You At School!

      Mar 14, 2023

      IVIVIDLY REMEMBER the first time a teacher told me how to learn. Not what to learn. Plenty of teachers had done that over the years. No: this was about how to do it—in a fun, fast and effective way. One Friday afternoon, our history teacher showed us

      1 min read

    • Article

      Helping Parents to Get Their Kids "Talking, Thinking And Feeling".

      Apr 19, 2021

      Just like all parents, we have a very busy life (even before the Covid-19 situation!) – juggling work, home, kids etc. It always feels like the kids are growing up too fast, and before long, they will be lost to “big” school and social media! Have yo

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans

    5/5

    4 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Thank you so much for the great ideas in this book!

    Book preview

    English Rocks! 101 ESL Games, Activities, and Lesson Plans - Greg Strandberg

    Introduction

    I wish I had this book when I first started teaching in China back in 2008. I knew nothing; less than nothing in fact. It took me months to figure out what I was doing, and both my students and I suffered needlessly during that time. But learn I did, although it was often difficult. I tried new games and activities, and some worked and some didn’t.

    Over the past 5 years I’ve been learning what works and what doesn’t by teaching English firsthand in China. During that time I’ve had thousands of students in my classes. Not all of them have been good at English, and many don’t care for it at all. But all of them like to have fun in class, and you can use that to make your English classes better.

    When I first got to China I started out teaching in a public school with 50 kids in a class. I did that for two years, often with little or no materials provided to me. After that I kicked around some training centers for three years, and although they each had their own unique curriculums, I always found them lacking. All throughout that period I taught students one-one-one as VIPs as well. Tutoring kids one-on-one presents its own set of challenges, and I developed unique and interesting games to make learning that way both fun and easy.

    This book is the culmination of all that experience, and it’s presented to you in an easy-to-read style that won’t have you scratching your head wondering what’s being said. You can easily flip through the different lessons with the HTML table of contents, so finding a quick game while you’re already in class won’t be a problem.

    There are 101 lessons, and 112 pictures in this book. Several of the lessons require handouts, PowerPoints, or other supporting materials that you just can’t get in an eBook. That’s why I put them on my website esladventure.com for free.

    That’s right! I’m not going to charge you for these simple things that you could really make yourself. What I do want to do is save you the time of making them, while also giving you a template. Use it to make your own games and activities, or just these 101 that much better.

    You’ll find the link to the free English Rocks! files page at the end of this book.  On that page you’ll find free files that only you can get, and which others have to buy from the site.  They’re yours simply for buying this book.

    My students loved playing games in my classes, and they’ll love playing games in yours as well when you try out the ideas in this book and the supporting files on the site. When you want to move on to teaching English, there’ll be plenty of activities, warm-ups, and lesson plans to effectively target the vocabulary and grammar that you’re using in class on a daily basis.

    I’ve put my 5 years of teaching knowledge into this book, and my biggest hope is that it will help you and other teachers out there. So get ready to have some fun – your English class is about to get a whole lot better with English Rocks!

    1-28: #-C

    # On Card

    Oftentimes my students will come back from a long holiday break, or perhaps a week of rigorous testing. Either way, they haven’t been in my English class for awhile, and they’re a bit rusty. It’s never easy to get back into the swing of things, and it’s even more difficult when you’re coming back from a long absence.

    That’s why I try to make it easy on students and start off with a quick warm-up activity. The premise is simple: give each student a card from your deck of cards, or let them choose from some that you’ve set down out on the floor.

    Each student will have a number on the card, and they will have to say that many things based on what your topic sentence is.

    For instance, if the students are coming back from their holiday, your topic sentence could be During the holiday I... Students will then have to say things like, During the holiday I ate breakfast; I ate lunch; I ate dinner; I brushed by teeth; I played computer games.

    That student must have drawn a 5, because he said 5 things. I encourage students to say what they didn’t do, as they’ll usually get stuck, especially if they have a high number. I never count the face cards, so the highest number you can get is 10.

    This activity takes a while when you have a larger class, and students also tend to get bored as you go around to each student individually, so keep that in mind. Still, I pull this activity out quite often, at least once a month, and it goes over well. Probably the most enjoyable part for the students, besides when they get done speaking, is when they see another classmate get a high number.

    Another great strategy that I recently found out involves Uno cards. I don’t always have my deck of playing cards on me, but I almost always have a deck of Uno cards in my bag. And the great thing about Uno cards is that they have a ‘zero.’ I love to put one ‘zero’ down so that some lucky student doesn’t have to say anything, although they earn the jealousy, and perhaps animosity, of their classmates. And you run the risk that someone might find it on the first try, which kills the suspense and make the game a bit less fun.

    Expect to get 10 to 15 minutes out of this warm-up activity when you give it a try in your ESL class.

    1 & 2 Stand in Line

    This is a great warm-up activity for ESL students of all levels. I came up with it a few years ago when I needed something for my longer summer classes. I also wanted something that would be good for when parents came and watched their kids on the last day of class.

    The class I had at the time was quite low, and most of them were around 7 to 8 years old. So you can imagine that their behavior wasn’t very good, really abysmal at best, and their language skills were about the same. Still, they were eager, energetic, and enticed when I told them we had a new ‘game.’

    The idea is simple: Prepare some scraps of paper before class that are numbered 1, 2, 1, 2, just like you were getting counted off in gym or PE class. You can even skip the numbers entirely and just count the kids off if you wish, but I find they’ll try to group together in lines of girls and boys. You know something is wrong when one line has seven students and the other has two. So I would go with the paper scraps.

    Now, the students have their numbers. Tell students with a 1 to raise their hands. Good. Now tell students with a 2 to raise their hands. Good. Now tell students with a 3 to raise their hands. Now you know who’s paying attention.

    Next, tell the 1’s to all stand up, and make a line right in front of where you’re standing. Quickly do the same with the 2’s, for you don’t want things to get chaotic, which believe me, they will.

    Before class you should have prepared a PPT or written some things on the board. What you want the students to do is to have a short conversation with the person opposite from them in the line.

    I usually write something like this.

    The first two students in line will have to read that from the board and fill in the gaps themselves. I’ll either have them sit down after that so that there’s not a lot of students standing up and playing around, or let the other person become a 1 or 2 so that they can get the most out of the exercise.

    This activity is a good way to get students talking after a long break, as well as showing their parents that they can talk. And in this activity, everyone has to speak, so it’s quite effective at building some basic language skills. Simply make the sentences more difficult for higher levels. I’ve gotten 10 to 15 minutes out of this, and you should be able to do the same.

    5-in-1

    One of the best games I ever came up with while teaching English in China is called 5-in-1. The game is so incredibly simple that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it during my first three years of teaching; it really would have saved me a lot of heartache, and the students a lot of boredom.

    Before class you need to do a little bit of work. Look at the students’ books to find out what vocabulary words they’re using. You can also throw in a lot of random words. The thing is, you need to come up with 5 words for each small piece of paper. Each piece of paper will be one game card. I usually use the following template when writing a new game card:

    – Noun (from unit);

    – Verb or Adjective;

    – Random;

    – Food/Item;

    – Action or Object.

    So you’re first game card might look something like this:

    – Waterfall;

    – Swim;

    – Dinosaur;

    – Desk;

    – Reading.

    I’ll usually make 15 to 20 game cards for each class that I want to play the game with. Usually I’ll have several left over, as I do the game toward the end of class.

    Students are divided into 2 teams, usually boys and girls;

    Students can say anything but the words on the card;

    Students are allowed to use actions, but they just can’t say the words on the card;

    You get 1 point for each word, and you have 1 minute to do it;

    That’s why it’s called 5-in-1. What’s great about it is that students really pick up on continuous tense if you include –ing words. They figured out they can say now to get their team to guess. All of my students get excited by this game, and even the most shy will volunteer.

    I encourage students to skip a word if they don’t know it, and I don’t help them at all. It’s a great way to sit back and let the students do all the work.

    The game works great if you pull up Online Stopwatch on the classroom computer. It’s even better if you can put that up on the large monitor, if your classroom has one. Students get excited by the ‘race-against-the-clock’ aspect of the game, and there are a lot of laughs at some of the things that are said when trying to make their team guess.

    Expect to get anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes for this activity, and don’t be surprised if your students don’t want to stop playing.

    Anagram/Cryptogram

    I was at a summer training session during my first year at a training center, and one of the presenters had us do a great activity. I learned later that it was called an anagram, or a cryptogram. It is one of the warm-up activities I use most often in my own classes, especially when I take something from their book for inspiration.

    The idea is really easy, and the preparation before class isn’t too difficult, especially when you use the great cryptogram-making tool at Discovery Education’s Puzzlemaker.

    All you need to do is come up with a good sentence or phrase and write it into the ‘phrase’ box. Then choose some letters that you want the students to know, and put those in the ‘give away letters’ box.

    I usually give away some of the lesser-used consonants, such as C, M, or P. And I always cross out the boxes

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1