Fantastic Back to School Activities for your ESL Classroom

Back to school is almost upon us! Here you will find some fun activities for your English lessons.

Secret Agents

What child doesn’t enjoy being able to carry out a secret mission? These secret agent boom cards are a great way of doing that while focusing on learning essential school-related vocabulary. These self-grading, online exercises are fantastic. They’ll be especially useful for children who have been almost addicted to technology while off school as you can then ease them in gently by at least ensuring screentime is educational.

Something in Common

This is such a fun activity and children love it. It’s a great way to get them asking and answering questions. Create a grid with four sections with headings, e.g. favourite TV programme, favourite food, shoe size. Students should fill it in for themselves. Next, they should go around the room and ask others questions to find someone who has given the same answer as them. It is a fantastic activity for more advanced learners.

Jumbled sentences

There is something so engaging about physically moving words around to create sentences. Often, the action of picking something up, looking at it, and manipulating it can help to consolidate the language they are learning. These excellent back to school mixed up sentences are fantastic. Not only do they help with reading and writing, but they can also support understanding of punctuation.

Listen and do

Following instructions can often be a challenging activity for students. They might pick up a couple of  the main words, but then neglect other important information, thus misunderstanding completely. With this superb listen and do activity pack, you can choose from 1-step directions, 2-step directions or blank, allowing you to add your own. The idea is that children read the instructions and follow them. For example, it may say Colour the board green. Alternatively, with the blank boards, you could read out the instructions, so they are focusing on their listening skills rather than reading.

Label the pictures

Another excellent boom cards activity is this label the picture one. It focuses on important words that students should learn about items within the classroom and school. Children will adore this because they can almost lose themselves in it and forget they are learning. Once they have done the boom cards activity, get them to do it for real. Give them paper and pens, encourage them to write labels in English, and then allow them to place them in the correct place. It’s great for checking they know the spellings, too. To extend the learning of more advanced learners, encourage them to incorporate them into sentences, such as This is the desk.

Your students will love these Would You Rather Questions! When using these interactive cards for back to school, you can use them as ice breakers for your ELL / ESL / EFL students to help them get to know each other. For the end of the year would you rather prompts, you can have students try to guess what their classmates would choose after getting to know them all year! Such fun speaking and listening practice!

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Happy Back to School!