With Halloween coming up on October 31, it’s the perfect time to learn about Spiders!

Our creepy, crawly Spiders lesson in our Discovery Center includes discussion questions, vocabulary development tasks, a crossword, a word maze, comprehension questions, and a short reading full of interesting facts (did you know there’s one bug spiders won’t eat?). There is even an optional black-and-white title page for your students to color.

For more Halloween activities and lessons to do this week, check out Spooky Halloween Fun for Young Learners on our blog! We’ll also have two new blog posts for you this week: Fear and Phobias – English Idioms on Tuesday and That’s Wicked! 20+ Halloween Activities, Apps & Tools Kids Will Love All Year Long on Wednesday. (more…)

Please see our updated post from 2015: http://bit.ly/Halloween-Vocab-for-Kids

This week’s Spotlight lesson is Swimming with Sharks! Having a blank board game like this one is very useful for teachers—there are so many ways it can be modified.

This game is an adaptation of Snakes & Ladders, a game that progresses by rolling a dice and trying to be the first to reach the end. Nets allow students to skip some spaces, while red squares knock students back several spaces. Because this board is blank, teachers can modify it to suit whatever language target students are studying!

Modification examples (more…)

Teachers and parents, are your kids learning to print the alphabet? This week’s Spotlight lesson features a comprehensive Alphabet Review from Book 2 of our Phonics Cafe section of lessons. Young English language learners will love the colorful illustrations and engaging activities!

This 23-page phonics lesson can be broken up and done over several days so that your learners get as much practice as they need. You can use this lesson on its own to teach students how to print uppercase and lowercase letters, or as a review to the phonics lessons in Book 1 (which are divided up into smaller sections: A–F, G–L, M–R, and S–Z). The printing exercises in Alphabet Review are interspersed with a variety of fun activities (such as exercises matching the letters to sounds) so that kids will get ample practice recognizing, saying, and printing these letters without getting bored!  (more…)

Is sushi tastier than pasta? Our brand-new Comparative Adjectives lesson gives young learners a lot of practice comparing people, places, and things.

This colorful, eight-page lesson starts off with a simple grammar explanation. This is followed by a variety of activities such as a fill-in-the-blanks exercise, a spot-the-errors exercise, and a pair work exercise that are sure to engage your students. There is also a bonus page on spelling rules for adjectives ending in -er that you can hand out and review with your students if needed. (more…)

Writing doesn’t have to be difficult! First, teach your young learners our tips on how to start a paragraph and how to write a paragraph. Next, try our writing activity, A Day at School, which guides students with word and sentence prompts. Soon your students will be writing with ease! (more…)

The present tenses are fairly simple to master on their own, but students can get confused when they’re paired in the same context. Seeing the simple present and present progressive together in the same text really helps students figure out when to use each one. This week’s Spotlight lesson, Pako, features a reading and exercises that use both tenses. (more…)

Learning vocabulary thematically helps students remember new words more easily. Repetition that’s varied and engaging is also helpful. The lessons in our Word Bank are grouped by theme and contain eight pages of fun, colourful exercises each! We’ve just created a NEW vocabulary lesson for your young learners on The Face.

The Face includes a colorful picture dictionary, matchup, word choice, word search, word scramble, and spelling bee. This lesson covers all the basic parts of the face as well as some more detailed parts such as eyelids and eyelashes. Discussion questions at the end allow your students to practice the new vocabulary in context. (more…)

This week’s Spotlight lesson is Back to School – Find the Objects. Kids are back to school this week in many countries, and we think this worksheet is a fun way to go over basic classroom vocabulary!

Have your young learners match the objects in the drawing to the vocabulary words. Being able to visualize the vocabulary on paper as they learn it should help them remember new words. Once they’ve finished matching the vocab, you can correct it as a class and demonstrate the pronunciation of the words. Then your kids can color the picture for fun! A good follow-up activity would be to have them walk around the class in pairs, saying each vocabulary word out loud as they find the object in the classroom. You could also have them explain what each object is used for. (more…)

The environment is an important topic, but students can find it a little dull. Kids love talking about cars, though! Combine these two topics in our updated Smart Cars lesson, which makes learning about the environment lots of fun!

Our Smart Cars lesson in the Discovery Center includes discussion questions, pre-reading vocabulary, a short reading full of interesting facts, comprehension questions, vocabulary review exercises, and a word maze. There is even an optional black-and-white title page for your students to color.

For related materials, check out Where’s the Puppy? Preposition Practice for IN and ON on our blog for a free worksheet on prepositions used for transportation. (more…)