Worksheets to Teach Language |
 |
| Here below lie many an activity to teach young and old urchins the arcane ways of English. |
An adjective-heavy horoscope |
Present Progressive |
Body parts and actions |
Invite your famous friends to make merry |
...picking your runny nose with a green thumb |
|
 |
 |
An adjective-rich horoscope for beginners and a "personality test" they can administer to a partner before seeing what the stars have to say. |
 |
Make Jessie James proud. Have your kids make wanted posters using present progressive and hand each other in! Example: She has stolen Tokyo Disneyland. |
|
 |
Some Body A nifty handout to teach important things like 'elbow' and groovy actions such as 'sit down.' (Also see Chain Reaction, below.) |
|
 |
Chain Reaction An activity to teach body parts and actions. Give one or more cards to each student. One person starts by doing the motion under "Your action." This is the "trigger" for someone else to do their gesture, which signals another person... | |
| Party schedule and name tags of famous people for practicing invitations, refusals, and infinitives (e.g., "to come"). Students take on the persona of a celebrity, and pick a time to have a party and write this in on their schedule. They must however also schedule other activities during the week (e.g., swimming, sleeping, television interviews) -- how many activities depends on the class size. I'd suggest at least ten. When you give the signal, students start to mingle, asking each other if they can come to their party. If an invited person can, they sign the other's sheet. If they're busy, too bad... At the end of the time, the person with the most people coming to their party is declared "most popular." |
||
 |
Party Schedule |  |
Celebrity Name Tags |
 |
Funny English A handout with purposefully vague examples illustrating 'funny' English. | |
| Lesson Idea: Split your class into teams and assign each different phrases. Each group receives the real definitions, but they must try to think of untrue explanations for some of their phrases -- and fool the other team, if they can. | ||
 |
Funny Body English Peach fuzz, Adam's apple, widow's peak... do you know these? Or are you wet behind the ears? * Widow's peak: a V-shaped hairline (vampires have them); forked tongue: liar; wet behind the ears: young or inexperienced. |
|
 |
English Insults A crictical skill for those traveling abroad, insulting should be honed to a razor-sharpness. Lesson Idea: Challenge neighboring classes to a rumble. Last standing wins. |
|
 |
Teach your charges how to express opinions by putting them in the most compelling circumstance -- a situation of life or death! If they ever find themselves alone in English-Speaking-Land, they will thank you. |
|
 |
Buzz-Whirr-Splat! Use onomatopeic expressions (words that sound like the sounds that they represent) to teach phonics. First, go over common phonetic constructions (e.g., ph, spl, wh, ou and so on), and then divide into teams. Each team has answers for only some of the sounds (i.e., which pictures match which sounds). They then take turns asking each other, for example, what event "splat" matches. I let them try to pronounce the words as best they can. |
|
 |
Lesson Idea: Show the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark (where Indiana steals an aborigine idol and escapes angry natives -- oh, so PC). Have the kids answer questions in passive voice using the worksheet. Example: Shots were exchanged by doctors. (vs. Doctors exchanged shots.) | |
| Note: Verbs have been coded on the worksheet according to their conjugation. The ABB pattern would be, for example, catch-caught-caught, while ABC would be give-gave-given. | ||
 |
A handout listing words incorporated into English and the langauges of origin. | |
This is an exercise for advanced classes (ones that can write sentences). I wrote several single-sentence "story openers" on the top of some pieces of paper and distributed them to the class. The first person reads what I wrote and then writes an additonal sentence to "continue" the story. That person then folds my sentence down so it can't be seen, and passes the paper along.The next person then does the same, folding down the previous classmate's sentence. In this way, the story grows, although piecemeal, as anyome can only read what the previous person had written. When we're done, I read them to the class. Here's an example produced by my adult Eikaiwa, all mistakes intact:
|
||
 |
This worksheet desmontsrates typical postcard language and how to address a postcard or letter in English (opposite of the order in Japanese). Lesson idea: Collect postcards and distribute them among your students. Each You collect the postcards, put them in an envelope, and send them to a person at home (e.g., to Canada), who then applies postage and returns the cards back seperately. Thanks to Miho Isima-sensei for this idea. |
|