Top 10 ESL elementary classroom ideas | kids activities

Let’s be real. Teaching English to kids sometimes isn’t easy. They are often not that interested in speaking English to each other, or to you! That’s why you’ll need a variety of speaking activities for kids to keep things fresh and interesting. Check out these fun ESL speaking games for children that are engaging, interactive and student-centred. ------- • Check out this blog post for more ESL kids activities: https://eslspeaking.org/kids-esl-speaking-games/ • Watch my other video on ESL tips here: https://youtu.be/RLML3XKsyng • Read my book: 101 ESL Activities for Kids here: https://amzn.to/4cAgwiZ • Join Jackie's email list: https://eslspeaking.org/subscribe/ ------ https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie?lang=en #teachingenglishwithjackie #classroominstruction #teachingtips -------------------------------------------------------- Transcript: Here are my top 10 ideas for ESL Elementary School classrooms. Number one is password. This is such a good vocabulary activity. So you can put words on pieces of paper and then divide the class into two teams. The first team sends up one person to sit in a chair facing their team and you can stand behind them with the words. You can show the word on the piece of paper to the rest of the team and they have to describe what that word is using only English. The second idea I have is charades or Pictionary. Charades is acting, and Pictionary is drawing. People will act or draw out a word or phrase and then their teammates have to guess what it is. The third idea I have is puzzles. It can be pretty tedious to make your own, so I always use www.discovery.com Puzzlemaker. The next idea I have for Elementary School classrooms are board games. If you're a language teacher it's very easy to make your own board games based on whatever vocabulary or grammar that you're teaching. For example, if you're teaching about advice, I would fill up my board with little problems that people might have. For example, I'm so tired at school every day, or my class is so boring. And then when a student lands on that square, they have to give some advice to that person or that problem. Chain spelling is a fun activity and I get everyone to stand up and then I say a word. For example, for very young elementary school learners, maybe we're focusing on colors, so I would say orange. The first student says the first letter O, and the next one O R, the next student O R A, and you just kind of keep going around in a circle. Show and tell is a kind of a nice way for students to talk about things that they are interested in. So they can bring a small object into school, if it's too expensive or if it's like a pet, if it's too big like a piano or something like that, they can bring a picture. I like to assign maybe like two or three students each day. The next idea for Elementary School classrooms is Hot Potato. You can do the actual Hot Potato game, or you can kind of make your own hot potato. I bring a little stuffed animal or like a little ball, something soft that's not going to hurt people if it gets thrown, and then you can look on YouTube for hot potato timer and just it will play music but it like stops at random times. So the students try to quickly pass around that object and then who's ever holding the object when the time goes off, they have to do something: a task of some kind. The next idea I have for Elementary School classrooms is flash cards. Flashcards are one of the most versatile things that you could possibly use in your classroom and yeah, you can just for very beginners, show the flash card and students can say the word. For slightly higher level, they could make a sentence. Picture prompt is when I use this kind of for like a little lead in to a lesson. Maybe if I'm teaching about food, I would maybe show a picture of people like eating a brunch of things, or maybe like at a restaurant, something like that. And then I would ask students what do you see and they'd say: ice cream. And then kind of you can reframe it like, the man is eating ice cream. The final idea is story starters. If you tell students write a story, they often will feel kind of overwhelmed just because there isn't really enough information. There's not really enough like input I guess and students can kind of be overwhelmed by choices sometimes. If I want students to write a story and we want to work on that, I would maybe have like two or three story starters and then students can choose one story starter that sounds interesting to them. How much of a story starter you give kind of depends on the level. Timestamp ESL elementary classroom video: 0:00 Intro 0:09 Password 0:47 charades or Pictionary 1:04 Puzzles 1:32 Board games 2:19 Focus on spelling 2:59 Show n tell 3:33 Hot potato 4:20 Fl