ESL Lesson Plans

 This game is fun, loud and super engaging. Your students might get very creative as their answers will be considered correct as long as other students agree they are. A student gets a category and has five seconds to come up with three things that fall into it. For example, they might need to name three things people have for breakfast. Some will give simple answers, like cereal, coffee and toast, in which case they get a point (although scores are not that important in the game – students are likely to just want to play it for fun). The challenge, however, is that five seconds is not a lot of time. So a student might fail to come up with obvious things and say whatever comes to mind, like carrot, snack and water, just to say something within the five seconds. Now is the time when other students either accept the answers or not. If they don’t, or if the student fails to provide three answers, the person sitting on their right (or the one whose turn comes after) tries to come up with three new things that fall into the category. If they manage to do that, they get a point. Otherwise the following student gets a different category.

 It’s quite important to use a sound to mark the end of the five seconds. You can use a simple timer. Make sure that you start the timer after you have finished reading the category.

 This is one of the ESL speaking games that gives students an opportunity to not only speak but also practise question formation. In the game, a student gets a word and others can ask any 20 yes or no questions to guess what the word is. The questions can be as simple as Is it a type of food? to more elaborate ones like Is it something people usually keep in the fridge? or Is it bigger than a fork? For lower-level students, the words could be limited to objects but higher-level students could also use places, ideas or people. This game doesn’t require much preparation and, after seeing some examples, your students can be the ones who come up with the words to guess.

 This fun guessing game is also great grammar practice. A student gets a verb that others need to guess by asking questions and using the word coffeepot as a substitute for the verb. So they might ask: Do people coffeepot every day?, Have we coffeepotted in this lesson?, Are you coffeepotting now?, Is coffeepotting something people do on purpose? or Is coffeepotting dangerous? The answers don’t need to be limited to just yes or no, so the answering student can explain that it could be dangerous but people do it regularly and no one gets hurt. Students can also ask open-ended questions like In what situations do people coffeepot? or Why do people coffeepot every day? The answering student may decide to provide more or less help to other students by giving them responses with varying levels of detail. The verbs that work best in this game are those that refer to what people (or animals) do and that are intransitive (e.g. it is fairly easy to guess the verb swim but not necessarily the verb use).

 This is one of the funniest ESL speaking games. Students guess a word based on one-word clues. The game is ideally played in groups of four, with two pairs in each group. One person in each pair gets the same word and they need to help their partners guess the word by giving them one-word clues. The game might go like this: students A and B get a word (e.g. roses). Student A gives the first clue to their partner (e.g. red) while the other pair listens. Student A’s partner tries to guess the word but fails (e.g. they say light). Now student B gives a one-word clue to their partner (e.g. dozen) while the other pair listens. Their partner says eggs, which means that it is student A’s turn again. The clues follow until one of the partners guesses the word. You can see (and show your students) how the game is played in this video (00:56-02:18).

 Alternatively, the game can be played in pairs, in which case students could be limited to using only two or three words to help their partners guess the ‘password’. It could also be played in threes: two students might give clues to one person.

 Are you excited to try these games with your students? You can use our ready-made lower-level (A2-B1) and higher-level (B2-C1) guessing game lesson plans or create your own ESL speaking games. Let us know how it went in the comments below!

 If you are new to ESL Brains e-lesson plans, or have just started teaching online and don’t have much experience with Google Slides, you may find this tutorial useful.

 We’d like to share a few tips with you on how to use our e-lesson plans efficiently, as well as point out some differences and similarities between the structure of our worksheets and e-lessons. Hopefully, this will help you make the transition to teaching online with ESL Brains easier and smoother.

 Click the ‘e-lesson plan’ button on our website and it will open as a presentation in Google Slides. You can download the presentation as a PowerPoint if you need to edit the slides, but you may have to adjust the content, as some of it may be out of place. That’s why we recommend presenting online in Google Slides!

 If you’ve been using ESL Brains worksheets, then you’ll already be familiar with comments for teachers in the teacher’s versions (in red font). We use them to suggest extra ideas or alternative ways of approaching a task, explain the meaning of difficult vocabulary or point out language curiosities and extra resources. You’ll find all these extra comments highlighted in yellow in speaker notes at the bottom of the slide.

 Speaker notes is the space where we also place timestamps to help you find the answers to some questions about the videos. Occasionally, you may want to replay the video to let students hear the answers again, or even ask them to watch it again at home and write down exactly where the answers are. Some of the answers, which aren’t visible for students on the slides, are visible only for teachers in the speaker notes.

 A typical ESL Brains e-lesson plan is very similar to our worksheets in terms of its structure. After an introductory slide with the lesson title, you’ll find the exercises arranged in the same order as in the worksheets, separated by red section slides.

 give you the chance to add something extra yourself – maybe your own question or a favourite short activity related to what follows – or refer back to what you’ve just finished and answer students’ questions.

 In our e-lesson plans you’ll often see animations, which we use to reveal the correct answers one by one (most of the time in red boxes or as phrases highlighted in yellow). This way, we give teachers a chance to elicit answers from students first, allowing them some time to make and discuss predictions, and also help focus their attention on specific parts of the lesson. You need to be in presentation mode to be able to see them (check out the last paragraph!).

 Whilst guiding teachers through ESL Brains online materials, we mustn’t forget to mention our flipped lessons. A flipped classroom uses a blended learning teaching model where students need to get acquainted with some theory, watch a video or study new vocabulary on their own before coming to class. To help teachers organise their online work, our flipped e-lesson plans are divided into pre-class and in-class activities. You can easily see where each section starts thanks to the section slides in the skipped slides mode which are visible only to teachers and skipped during the presentation. They show you which activities we suggest setting as homework before teaching the lesson, and which should be done in class.

 As we all know how much students enjoy games and group activities at the end of a lesson, we’ve included interactive versions in our e-lesson plans. For role-play activities, instead of giving a set of cards to each pair, teachers use a role-play slide with buttons (like the one below). You only need to assign one set to each pair and make sure everyone knows which button to click, or send them direct links to role cards. Then, students follow the instructions on a slide which opens in a new window (an equivalent of a role-play card) and complete the task in a breakout room. The interactive role-play cards aren’t visible in the presentation.

 In our e-lessons, speaking practice can also take place as a whole-class activity. In turns, students click a box and do the speaking activity, following the instructions on a new slide linked to that box. Then, they click the ‘Go back’ button in the bottom right corner which takes them back to the main slide.

 Depending on your personal preferences, you can choose to use our e-lesson plans in two ways: in edit or presentation mode. There are advantages and disadvantages of each. So, what’s the difference?

ESL Lessons

 Edit mode is what you see when you first open a presentation in Google Slides. It allows you to create and make changes to the slides while presenting. You should use it when you want students to complete the activity you’re teaching by moving content or typing into the presentation (just share your screen with them or even give them control over your screen and let them do it themselves). It also allows you to see speaker notes at all times.

 Importantly, if you want to use our presentation in edit mode you must make your own copy of it first. If you don’t know how to do this, see the speaker notes on the first slide of any e-lesson plan for instructions.

 This is where information is presented in full screen, without any slides on the side. You can play videos and listen to audio in presentation mode, but students can’t edit any activities or type in their answers. They’ll be able to see the animations, though, which isn’t possible in edit mode.

 To be able to see speaker notes, you need to use Presenter view. To do this, click the ‘Down’ arrow on the ‘Present’ button, choose ‘Presenter view’ and ‘Speaker notes’. This way, your students will see only what’s on the slides, while you’ll have access to the comments for teachers in speaker notes. Presentation mode is also great if you want to share information with your students.

 ‘Authentic’ materials are created for fluent speakers of a language, rather than for language learners. But more and more often teachers are realizing that real-life resources can be successfully used both in ESL lessons and outside the classroom to develop students’ language skills. The internet provides an endless source of videos and articles which, as you will see below, can benefit both you and your students.

 With the world changing at a remarkably rapid rate, new and exciting topics are constantly springing to life. Students love sharing their opinions on these changes, as they impact their everyday lives. Authentic videos and articles on up-to-date topics can be used to spark a conversation, as well as introduce, practise or revise any aspect of language. They are a rich source of input and ideas that can be talked over in the lesson. See how it works in the Metaverse lesson, where students watch videos on different aspects of life in metaverse and share their opinions on the idea, but also practise the use of intensifiers.

 Being exposed to authentic language builds students’ confidence. They stop seeing English as a completely ‘foreign’ language, and gradually immerse themselves in it. They are therefore more likely to engage in conversations with other English speakers outside the classroom, which is the main reason why many of them learn the language in the first place! A well-designed lesson based on authentic materials will use the real-life language from the video and create opportunities for students to use it in different contexts. Check out the It’s kind of my favourite stuff lesson plan in which students not only watch an authentic video for listening comprehension, but also use the vague language learnt from it to describe their favourite things.

 Even lower-level students can benefit from real-life videos. ‘Aren’t these too difficult for them?’, one could ask. Well, they might be. But so what? It is OK that they don’t understand every word from a video, because that is exactly what happens outside the classroom! They need to get used to hearing the language and, rather than trying to understand every word, they should listen for gist. It’s a perfect way to help them overcome their fear of language immersion. What‘s more, authentic materials can be used as a prompt for eliciting specific answers, like in the ‘You’re kidding!’ and other quick responses lesson.