Vocabulary is much easier for ELLs to learn when they can visualize the words. With 42 picture and word cards, our updated Fish & Reptile Cards make vocabulary learning fun! (more…)

Are you heading back to school? It’s a good time of year to review School Subjects! (more…)

Take a trip down under with our new lesson on Australian Animals! (more…)

With all the snow and ice at this time of year in many countries around the world, it’s a good time to discuss accidents and injuries! Our new Word Bank lesson has enough variety and repetition to ensure your young learners master this set of terms for common injuries.

Our Injuries vocabulary lesson includes a colorful picture dictionary, matchup, word choice, word search, word scramble, and spelling bee. This lesson will also teach students when an injury needs a reflexive pronoun (e.g., He cut himself). Discussion questions at the end allow your learners to practice the new vocabulary in context. (more…)

Time flies when you’re having fun! When you enjoy blogging about grammar, teaching, and the English language as much as I do, a year of weekly blog posts goes by just like that! Our goal at Sprout English has always been to provide quality educational materials to English teachers and students, and my personal wish is that teachers and students will continue to learn from and use our free blog materials. We love helping young learners grow their English skills!

I thought it would be helpful to organize all the articles I’ve written so far into a list that’s easily accessible. (Some articles are included twice if they belong to more than one category.) I hope you find this resource list useful! (more…)

Learning new vocabulary can be a struggle for English language learners. Teachers can make it easier and more interesting with flashcards! This week our Spotlight was on Clothes in the Card Games section of our Games Room, and we wanted to give teachers some suggestions on how to use these flashcards in class. If you have your own favorite flashcard activity, please write it in the comments section below—we’d love to hear it!

Activities with Cards/Flashcards for Clothes & Shopping:

1. Dress Up: Put students into pairs and have them draw two stick figures (a man and woman or a boy and girl). Give each student a set of flashcards and tell them to place the clothing pictures on the stick figures to “dress them up.” Students should discuss their choices using the clothing vocabulary. You can repeat this activity using different themes such as formal, casual, business, etc. Ask each pair to come up with a theme to share with the class.

2. Silly Dress Up: (more…)

Clothes and shopping are popular topics in most classrooms. With 32 picture cards and 32 word cards, our Clothing Cards make vocabulary learning fun!

How are your students feeling today? The useful “Be verb + Adjective” structure is something students usually learn early on that allows them to express feelings. Our Adjectives lesson in the Basic Grammar Structures section of the Grammar School gives students plenty of practice with this structure! (more…)

Teaching from a textbook all day can be tedious for both students and teachers. Breaking up the time with interactive warm-ups, filler, and wrap-ups makes the lesson engaging and fun! One way to do this is with cards—both flashcards and playing cards. Using cards in the classroom also lets you sneak in some learning while your students think you’re just playing a game. Young learners, especially, respond well to games, and if the games are educational, there’s no reason to limit their use! Games can involve speaking, vocabulary, grammar, etc., but today I’ll focus on ways to use vocabulary cards.

Card & Flashcard Games:

Try the following games with Sprout’s cards in the Card Games section of the Games Room. We have image/word card sets on animals, clothes, farm animals, fish and reptiles, fruit, jobs, prepositions, verbs, and adjectives! (more…)