Our Spotlight lesson this week is The Face, a fun and colourful vocabulary lesson from our Word Bank – Describing People & Things section. As a follow-up and expansion, try teaching some common adjectives that your students can use to describe the face and hair. You can also use these adjectives with Tara’s vocabulary activity (which will be on our blog on Thursday). Scroll down to the end of this post for examples, sentence patterns, and a discussion on comma placement with multiple adjectives.

Eyes (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…)

This week’s Spotlight lesson is a Listen and Draw / Read and Draw activity on Hotels, which may naturally lead to a discussion on travel. Travel is a popular topic with students—they love to discuss where they’ve been and where they would like to go next! Expand their travel vocabulary with one of my favorite go-to games that makes learning vocabulary fun. A little competition is great for engaging beginner/low-intermediate or high-intermediate/advanced students and it also helps them remember the new words!

Use the green links below the vocabulary lists to download one or both of the PDFs. The instructions for playing are also below the lists! (more…)

So many prepositions, so little time! English language learners tend to struggle with prepositions because of the wide variety of meanings and uses. Breaking prepositions up into types can help! The focus this week is on prepositions of place in our Word Bank lesson on Prepositions.

This lesson contains eight beautifully illustrated pages that include a colorful picture dictionary, matchup, word choice, word search, word scramble, and spelling bee. Discussion questions at the end allow your students to practice prepositions in context! (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!

Please see Independence Day & Canada Day Vocabulary Lessons for an updated post.

Turn this popular kids’ food into a lesson! Your young learners will enjoy learning about Pizza and how it’s served all around the world.

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

Check out our blog this week for related grammar tips and an activity. On Tuesday, Tanya will blog about Some Vs. Any—get students to practice these quantifiers while talking about pizza in her suggested activity. On Thursday, Tara will blog about a fun food-related activity to try in class: Countable or Uncountable Food: Our Buffet!

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Excitement is building all around the world for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which takes place in Brazil from June 12 to July 13. Kids usually get energized by anything sports-related, so get them into the spirit of the games with our featured vocabulary lesson on Soccer (Football)! (We’ve included both of the sport’s common names in our title because we have subscribers from all over the world. For those of you who might be unaware, this sport is known as “soccer” in the US and Canada and “football” to the rest of the world.)

In this eight-page Word Bank lesson, students will learn nine words associated with soccer, including soccer player, goalie, team, soccer ball, cleats, goal, score, kick, and run. (more…)