English learning activities for primary students
Let’s be real. Teaching English to kids sometimes isn’t easy. They are often not that interested in speaking English to each other, or to you! That’s why you’ll need a variety of speaking activities for kids to keep things fresh and interesting.
Check out these fun ESL speaking games for children that are engaging, interactive and student-centred. Your students will love them and keep coming back for more of these speaking games for kids.
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Transcript:
These are some of my favorite English learning activities for primary students.
The first one is password. So this is a fun vocabulary game. Write some vocabulary words on pieces of paper and then divide the class into two teams. And so the first team sends up one person who sits in a chair facing their classmates. And then the teacher stands behind that student and holds up one of those vocabulary words words. The rest of the class on that team or the rest of the team has to describe that word to the student sitting in the chair and the student has to guess what it is. • ESL Activities for Teenagers: Password | A...
The next ideas I have for primary students are charades and Pictionary Charades is when you act out something and Pictionary is when you draw something. These are basically vocabulary games that I'm sure you've played before plenty of times. • An English Speaking activity for teens: Pi...
The next idea I have for primary classrooms is show and tell. Students love to bring a little special thing in from home, they can also bring a picture of something if it's too big, for example, a piano or if it's for example, like a pet like a cat. Maybe they could bring a dog to school if their parents are willing but things like a cat or maybe a snake might be a bit chaotic. I love to just get students to bring in their special thing or a picture and then just talk about it for a minute or two in front of the class and then I also love to ask a follow-up question or two and then I encourage the other students in the class to also ask a follow-up question. • Show and Tell (A fun warm-up activity for ...
Hot Potato. If you want to create some fun and excitement in your classroom, try out this activity. So get an object, you can either get the real Hot Potato game, in that case, it's like one the plastic potato thing or you can get a soft object like a stuffed animal or maybe like a beach ball, something like that. I don't recommend anything hard because it gets kind of chaotic and sometimes students will end up throwing it. I don't want anyone to get hurt, so have something soft and then you can use the official Hot Potato game or you can look on YouTube for Hot Potato game music and then you play the music. Students pass around that object and when the Music stops, the person holding that object has to do a task of some kind. The task really is up to you. • Fun ESL Speaking Activity for Kids: Hot Po...
The next idea I have for primary classrooms is flashcards. I actually never set foot in a kindergarten classroom or an elementary school classroom without a set of flashcards Whatever the case is, I always bring them because they're kind of like my security blanket. There really is a million and one things you can do with flash cards. For example, for ESLm for very beginners, you could just simply show the flash card and they could say what it is. A cat. For higher-level students, they could say it's a cat. Slightly higher level, they could ask a question to another student. Do you have a cat? Yes, I do or no I don't. • Top 5 ESL Flashcard Games and Activities f...
You could also kind of play hide and-seek with things. Make a big show about like hiding the cat underneath someone's desk and then you put the picture of the dog maybe underneath a book, something like that. And then it kind of becomes a memory game. You could ask students, where's the cat? Where's the dog? That kind of thing. So those are my quick ideas for games for primary school students.
Timestamp conversation activities video:
0:00 Intro
0:09 Password
0:54 Charades
and pictionary
1:12 Show n tell
1:47 Hot potato
2:37 flashcards
3:28 Final thoughts