This week’s featured Sprout English lesson plan is all about hippos! I was excited to see the Did You Know lesson featured, because I wrote it when my young daughter was obsessed with hippos. She had a large collection of stuffed hippo pals, and while writing this lesson I learned that these animals aren’t as cute as they look. Hippos are such interesting creatures! Did you know that hippos wear sunscreen?

Stuffed animals and puppets can make fun and educational guest appearances in the young learner classroom. Invite your students to bring in a favorite stuffed animal to class. You may even want to ask the kids to leave a stuffed friend in a cubby at school. Create a sign up sheet, and have students write down the type of animal they plan to bring in. If a number of students plan on bringing a stuffed bear, try to encourage them to bring in a toy that is more unique, like a hippo! (more…)

Young learners love talking about their friends and family members. They also love showing off photos of their favorite people. You can combine these two interests with fun websites (or apps) like Fotobabble. Fotobabble allows your students to make talking pictures.

Here is a fun activity you can do to practice nations and nationalities with Fotobabble:

1) Ask your students to choose a personal photo (digital) that contains at least two people from different countries. The photos can be stored on your students’ phones, cameras, or computers. (more…)

Have you played the In My Suitcase memory game with your students? This is the game where you sit in a circle and the first student says,

“We are going on a trip, and in our suitcase I will bring…”

After the first student names one thing, the next student repeats the sentence, names his/her classmate’s item, and adds an additional item to the suitcase. For example:

“We are going on a trip, and in our suitcase we will bring a map, and a cell phone.”

As the game continues, the packing list gets bigger and harder to remember.

The suitcase game is excellent for practising nouns, but you can play a similar game to practice using the simple present tense to describe daily routines. Write the following starter sentences (time markers) on the board: (more…)

One of the best things I’ve seen implemented at my children’s elementary school is called DPA. This stands for “daily physical activity”, and it takes place in the classroom or hallway at a set time each day. During the brain break, students and teachers move away from their desks and dance to a song that some of the older kids have choreographed. Not only does DPA amuse the students and give them something to look forward to, it boosts the energy of the teachers and unites the school.

Besides dancing, there are tons of games for keeping young kids active during the school day. Here are some ideas and adaptations to try with your young English learners:

Drip, Drip, Drop – This is a variation of Duck, Duck, Goose, and is played outdoors on a warm day. The teacher brings out a big bucket of water and a sponge. The students sit in a circle. The teacher gets the sponge quite wet, so that it drips a bit. One student is chosen to stand up and walk on the outside of the circle. She says “Drip, Drip, Drip…” as she drips a bit of water on each classmate’s head. Instead of tapping one person’s head and shouting “Goose!” she shouts “Drop!” and squeezes the sponge out on her victim. The victim with the wet hair chases the sponge holder around the circle, trying to reach the empty spot in the circle first. Try some other variations, such as (more…)

My Official Handwriter
My daughter just started grade four in a Canadian public school, and one of the things she is most excited about is learning how to handwrite capital letters. She spent grade three learning how to handwrite lowercase letters, and was so proud to be one of the first “official handwriters” in her class. (I get it. I still have my grade four pen license.) Despite being an “official handwriter” in grade three, she was told that capitals had to wait until the following year. Of course, we taught her how to handwrite her first and last initials in uppercase at home, and she taught herself all of the other uppercase letters using an iPad app, but she wasn’t supposed to use capital cursives at school until she learned the proper form. This was somewhat understandable since I had to actually look up some of the letters, such as capital Q!

Cursive Vs. Keyboarding
Despite my daughter’s excitement about cursive, she may never formally learn how to handwrite capitals in school. Handwriting is no longer a compulsory part of the elementary school curriculum in our district. Many schools in the US have also downgraded the importance of handwriting in favor of keyboarding. Personally, I agree that typing is a much more important skill for today’s kids to learn. If there’s no room in the curriculum to teach both cursive and keyboarding, then it seems obvious which one should get the boot. (more…)

It’s Map Time: Using a Map with Young Learners

I was excited to see a tweet today from an ESL teacher in Iowa (@sturgeonesl) who is going to try using Sprout English materials with her young ELLs.

I immediately visited Ms. Libby’s blog and read a post about how she’s setting up her very first classroom. In her post, there are pictures of bookshelves, a calendar, and a map. Ms. Libby wrote:

“My roommate let me borrow this large map for my room. While right now I’m not planning on really doing anything with the map, I think it’s a good thing to showcase in an ELL room. And who knows, maybe it will come in handy later this year.” (more…)