I have one more week of teaching ahead of me. Three more weeks of work. There is more paperwork now than actual teaching. The kids can smell the summer holidays in the air and it shows. The teachers can barely hide how exhausted they are.
And it’s hot. Scorching hot. No AC in the building and my brain is shutting off. All I can see is myself on the beach, sipping a gin&tonic. But the kids still need to be educated. Motivated. Engaged. Entertained.
The perfect time for some fun speaking activities. Group work. Games. Anything. It’s too hot to be creative. I am thankful for any useful activity I can find so I put together a couple of fun ESL activities that I’m using these days. The kids are happy. My head didn’t explode. Win-win.
This activity is based on a popular board game. It is a more fun variation of a dictionary game I sometimes play with my students. They get a couple of difficult words and have to invent fake definitions. This game is the most popular among my kids.
This one is still popular. Revising vocabulary is always a good idea. There are plenty of different topics you can choose from. You can try our free games on the topic of Media or Business. Other topics include Health and Food.
The best thing about these fun ESL activities is that the variations are endless. You can either find some or have your students create their own. It’s more fun and they also learn more. Just give them a topic, have them write 10 questions and after that, they circle the class and interview as many classmates as possible. Finally, they inform the class about the results. Topics may include Environment, Hobbies, Books, Travel, Science, History, Media, Celebrities.
You can also find some interesting ideas in this article from Lessons Plan Digger, which inspired me to write this list.
For even more communicative activities, click below.
I came across a funny article about ridiculous complaints by spoiled holidaymakers. That inspired me to create this little worksheet/activity. I used it as a warm-up activity for my students the next lesson in which we covered writing complaints – holiday edition 🙂
Teacher tip: If they can’t come up with any own ideas in the second task, let them use some ideas from the list.
In pairs read the ridiculous complaints holidaymakers made to their travel agent.
Which is the craziest one? How would you have answered if you were in the place of the travel agent?
Why do you think people complain about these things?
Astonishing holiday complaints
1. “I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.”
2. “We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels.”
3. “The beach was too sandy.”
4. “On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food at all.”
5. “It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time – this should be banned.”
6. A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she’d been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.
7. “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white.”
8. A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time.
9. “We bought ‘Ray-Ban’ sunglasses for five Euros from a street trader, only to find out they were fake.”
10. “Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined, as my husband spent all day looking at other women.”
11. “No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled.”
12. “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It only took the Americans three hours to get home.”
13. “I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends’ three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller.”
14. “I was bitten by a mosquito. No one said they could bite.”
15. “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the accommodation’. We’re trainee hairdressers – will we be OK staying there?”
16. “There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners now live abroad.”
17. “My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”
18. “We had to queue outside with no air conditioning.”
These complaints are all taken from a survey from Thomas Cook and ABTA, revealing the most ridiculous complaints holidaymakers made to their travel agent.
Task 2
Think of two similar ridiculous complaints.
Role-play the dialogue with a classmate.
Student A You are an unsatisfied holiday maker and you are going to complain!
Student B You are a holiday representative and you try to be as polite as possible and explain the misunderstanding.
I often use various picture prompts for discussions, simple photo descriptions, storytelling, short warm-ups, fillers.
I used these two quite recently when discussing fashion. You can either have the students compare the photos or to create a short story for each of them.
This TedTalk ESL video lesson is based on a talk by Dao Nguyen. In this video she is talking about how media spreads online and the technology and data that publishers can use to understand why.
How do you decide if you should share something that you see online?
How do you protect your privacy on the Internet?
VOCABULARY
Read the sentences and try to work out the meaning of the underlined words/phrases.
Last year, some BuzzFeed employees were scheming to prank their boss, Ze Frank, on his birthday. They decided to put a family of baby goats in his office.
Ze kept on getting delayed: he went to get a drink, he was called to a meeting, the meeting ran long, he went to the bathroom
But it performed so much better than we had expected. What was it about the goats in the office that we didn’t anticipate?
The following week, armed with the additional knowledge that food videos are very popular, we dressed two people in hazmat suits and wrapped rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded.
It wasn’t the biggest live video that we had done to date. The biggest one that we had done involved a fountain of cheese.
This is who I am. This is my upbringing, this is my culture, this is my fandom, this is my guilty pleasure, and this is how I laugh about myself.
This is the group of jobs that makes me feel something — makes me curious or sad or restore my faith in humanity.
Turns out that this quiz went extremely viral among a group of 55-and-up women who were surprised and delighted that BuzzFeed determined that they were 28 and 5’9″.
This quiz was successful not because it was accurate, but because it allowed these ladies to do a very important job — the humblebrag.
One brainstorming session involved the job of bonding. So, could we make a recipe that brought people together?
Match the words/phrases (1-14) to their explanations (a-n).
to prank
to delay
to anticipate
hazmat suit
rubber band
to involve
upbringing
to restore
to turn out
delighted
determined
humblebrag
session
to bond
to pretend to be complaining but in reality to be proud of something
to bring back
the way a child is raised
to expect or predict
a meeting
to form a close relationship
to happen in a particular way
to play a practical joke on someone
to have a firm decision or a strong desire to do something
a circle of elastic rubber
to have or include as a part of something
a suit that protects against hazardous materials
to make someone late, not on time
very pleased
TED TALK VIDEO
Watch the video and answer the questions.
What animal did the BuzzFeed employees put in their boss’s office as a prank?
Why was their boss (Ze Frank) delayed?
Why was their Facebook Live experiment video so successful?
What are some of the “jobs” that the content is doing for the reader or the viewer?
Which “job” did the video about baking involve?
According to the speaker, which questions are important to answer if we want to create better content?
Have a look at our communicative activities. Click on the picture below.
Level: Pre- Intermediate, Intermediate Time:20-30min Skills:Speaking, Listening, Vocabulary Topic: Travel, Croatia, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Game of Thrones PDF version for easy printing:ESL Conversation Lesson Game Of Thrones And Traveling
ESL VIDEO LESSON PLAN: GAME OF THRONES AND TRAVELING
This is a list of my 10 favorite fun ESL/EFL websites which I regularly use when I want to spice things up a bit in the classroom, reward my students or give them some relax time.
These are all great for learning vocabulary, revising, they can be used in various projects, to promote reading, cooperation, creativity. There are soooo many things you can do with these sites, just use your creativity or get inspired by my tips.
With Kahoot, you can create various quizzes and games and if you’re in a bit of a hurry you can use its extensive library of quizzes. It has a number of quizzes on various vocabulary topics, grammar and many interesting topics such as history, geography, pop culture, trivia. My tip:Have your students sign up at Kahoot and create their own quiz. You can assign them a topic based on what you’re currently studying in the class or let them choose their own topic. They love creating their own quizzes, especially those with insider jokes.
2. Baamboozle
I use this site mostly with my younger learners as it doesn’t have many higher level grammar or vocabulary quizzes. My tip:put your students in teams (max number of teams is 4), choose a quiz and let them play the Classic mode with the power up, it’s much more fun!
Everybody knows Jeopardy. So far, I was able to find any grammar or vocabulary revision quiz I needed. Lots of quizzes on many topics, but beware as the quality varies. You can create your own Jeopardy quiz and you can also assign your students a topic and let them create their own quiz to test their classmates’ knowledge.
This is a similar site to now nonexistent Locate street (which I liked better). It uses Google Street View to drop you anywhere on the planet and you must guess your location based on vegetation, signs, people. It’s a funny way to teach the students about interesting and remote places. I sometimes use it as a reward, the kids love it. Tell them to sign up, it’s free and they will avoid the annoying pop up.
I didn’t expect a dictionary website to be this entertaining. There are games, quizzes, videos. They are educational and fun and I love them. My top picks:Name That Thing, there is also the Animal Edition of the game. You have 10 seconds to answer each question, 12 pictures and a lot of fun! How Strong Is Your Vocabularyis also fun and you can repeat after a couple of months to see if your students’s vocabulary has improved. Another game is a challenging puzzle which is described as “anagram puzzles meet wordsearch.” This one can also be downloaded to mobile phone.
How often do you explain the etymology of the vocabulary you are teaching? I do it quite often as many English words come from Latin, Greek, French and it’s easier for the students to remember the words when they see how similar the words can be to words in their own language(this applies to European languages).
As the name suggests, this site offers short, five-minute mysteries. Students have to sign up, it’s free and quick and then they can start sleuthing. Great activity for painless reading practice.
Here you can find plenty of simple, family-friendly games. I mostly use theWord Generatorfor charades, pictionary and other games. The great thing is I only need my laptop and I project the words on the whiteboard, so the students don’t need computers.
Sandrine Thuret: YOU CAN GROW NEW BRAIN CELLS. HERE’S HOW.
STUDENT’S WORKSHEET
WARM-UP QUESTIONS
What part of your body would you like to improve?
If it was possible, would you rather enhance your body or mind?
How can we improve our mental and physical abilities?
VOCABULARY
Read the sentences and try to work out the meaning of the underlined words/phrases.
And this is especially new and true for spatial recognition –so like, how you navigate your way in the city.
And they will have been helpful to add time to our memory and they will help differentiate very similar memories.
But moreover, if you just block neurogenesis, then you block the efficacy of the antidepressant.
“Sandrine, this is puzzling. Some of my patients that have been told they are cured of their cancer still develop symptoms of depression.”
………………..too much sex leading to sleep deprivation.
Intermittent fasting — spacing the time between your meals –will increase neurogenesis.
So Japanese groups are fascinated with food textures, and they have shown that actually, soft diet impairs neurogenesis, as opposed to food that requires mastication.
Calorie restriction will improve memory capacity, whereas a high-fat diet will exacerbate symptoms of depression –as opposed to omega-3 fatty acids, which increase neurogenesis, and also help to decrease the symptoms of depression.
Match the words/phrases (1-8) to their explanations.
spatial recognition
differentiate
efficacy
puzzling
deprivation
intermittent fasting
mastication
exacerbate
difficult to explain or understand
chewing
period of eating and not eating over a defined period
to show or find the difference between things that are compared
the lack or denial of something considered to be a necessity
make something that is bad even worse
understanding where things are in relation to other things
the ability to produce the desired result
TED TALK VIDEO
Watch the video and answer the questions.
How do we call the phenomenon when adults grow new nerve cells?
How many neurons does an average person produce per day?
Why did patients who were cured of their cancer still develop symptoms of depression?
Does learning increase or decrease the growth of new neurons?
What type of food and drinks should we consume if we want to increase the growth of our neurons?
Click on the picture below to buy our communicative activities.
