Categories: Education

Turn an English-as-a-Second-Language Warm-Up into a Lesson Plan

So you didn’t prepare an English-as-a-Second-Language lesson plan today, but you need a good ESL classroom idea that does not require any preparation? You have come to the right article. Simply extend my ESL classroom warm-up into a full ESL lesson plan that is a fun game for you and your ESL students. You can thank me later. Below I outline the ESL lesson plan to extend the ESL classroom warm-up into a full class lesson for both large and small classes. (If you are unfamiliar with the ESL warm-up of which I speak, please see my Associated Content ESL Classroom Warm-up article). As always I encourage you to be creative and brainstorm ways to make this easy ESL lesson plan your own.

Ages: teens to adults. Proficiency Level: Advanced Beginner and up. Class size: Small or large, Purposes: Practice sentence building, vocabulary. Materials: Students need paper and pencil. Preparation: NONE !!

Procedure: Begin class with the ESL Classroom Warm-up; creating the lists of words. Rather than erase the entire list, save 10 words, you can figure you will need at most 1 word for every 5 minutes of ESL classroom time, and use these words for the following easy ESL classroom game. As your ESL students have generated the word list, they should be familiar with all of the words. This is especially helpful for teachers, like me, who only see their students once a week (and your fabulous Korean co-teachers feel no need to inform you of what they are teaching your ESL students during the week).

After your ESL students have generated the word list and you have choosen 10 words for this instant ESL lesson (you will need approximately 1 word for every 5 minutes of ESL classroom time). Divide your ESL students into teams of 1-6 students. Below are the ESL lesson plans for these words.

ESL Lesson Plan 1: To use as a game. Give your ESL students 3 minutes to create a sentence, with a minimum of 4 words (or more if they are more advanced), that includes the given word. “I like”, “Í don’t like” and “Do you like?” sentences are not allowed. Only correct sentences will receive a point. Do an example for your ESL students first. At the end of 3 minutes 1 ESL student from each group stands up as says their sentence aloud and / or writes it on the board. Your job as the ESL teacher is to turn this into a learning process, so make sure you correct the sentences and have your ESL students repeat the correct sentence.

ESL Lesson Plan 2: Every ESL classroom session does not have to be a game. For a more relaxed class, use the same word list. You can write several examples on the board. Example “flower”: 1 My family is like a beautiful flower. 2 My mother grows flowers in her garden. This is to ensure your ESL students understand what they should do. Then just let your ESL students write sentences in their teams for about 15 or 20 minutes. You can walk around the room and help them so that they will be able to write their sentences in English on the board correctly.

If your ESL students are writing these sentences on the board, have your ESL students write their sentence in one color, I let them use white chalk or black dry marker, and you can make the corrections in another color, or you can rewrite the correct sentence underneath the students original sentence.

If you don’t want your ESL students to come up to the board and you are lucky enough to have a computerized ESL classroom, you can simply use “Word” and type the sentences as your ESL students say them so they appear on the screen. I use a font size of “40 bold” in my ESL classroom so everyone can see.

ESL Lesson Plan 3: Divide your ESL students into groups and have them generate their own word lists, then write the sentences. Walk around and help them with ideas and correct their work so they learn what the proper sentence would look like. When making corrections I am always conscious to try and keep as many of their words in the sentence as possible.

ESL Lesson Plan 4: As a variation on the game format in ESL Lesson Plan 1; let each group take turns picking a word for everyone to use in a sentence.

I hope you and your ESL students enjoy this instant no preparation ESL lesson plan. For more ESL lesson plan ideas please see my other articles posted here on Associated Content.