Category Full Lesson Plans
The Rainforest: A Camp Lesson Plan
As mentioned in the previous post, The U.S. embassy in Ecuador holds an English immersion camp for scholarship high school students. A group of fellow PCVs are charged with presenting backgroud information on the rainforest for the 2016 camp. Here is the lesson plan, which may give you ideas for your own camp.
Minding Our Emotions
Pixar’s animated film Inside Out can be a teaching tool to help students understand and express their emotions. The website provides four marvelous activities for students of all ages and language levels. Playing the movie and doing one of the activities could be a multipart class or an English club session.
Picture-bound Travel Adventure
Intermediate- level EFL students work in groups to write and tell a creative, cohesive travel adventure based on the people and places they select from pictures.
Visual Verb Variations
Building vocabulary is fundamental to literacy and creative writing. This lesson gives teachers a visual model to help their students build verb alternatives and, thereby, refine their choice of alternative words so that the verb effectively describes their thoughts.
Anecdotes: Tell Your Story
Sharing anecdotes gives students a chance to speak and write confidently about topics of their choice.
Shape Poems: Writing Starting From Vocabulary and Visual Images
A shape poem is a type of poetry that describes an object and is shaped the same as the object the poem is describing. Here language and vocabulary acquisition and exploration are developed into visual and sound patterns as students create shape poems. What a fun way to bring writing into the classroom!
Seeing Healthy Answers
Kevin McCaughey’s article “Practical Tips for Increasing Listening Practice Time ” in English Teaching Forum (Vol. 53, No.1, 2015) points out that students often don’t get much listening time in what teachers think are listening-focused activities. He offers tips on managing classroom listening activities where teachers can “see it” happen. This lesson uses a healthy eating […]
Live English
At Unidad Educativa Riobamba, Ecuador TEFL PCV Erin Fischer is bringing English to the classroom through cooking and recipes. The project goal is to have students interact with the language in a practical, hands-on way that mimics real life situations.
Unit Planning Templates
To facilitate her work and that of the 20 English teachers at her school, Ecuador PCV Yajaira Hernandez created two unit planning documents to ensure that her area met their lesson objectives and incorporated the four skills: reading, listening, speaking, and writing.
Creating a New Civilization
This activity can focus on speaking and/or writing. It is a great opportunity for group work; students make decisions about the fate of 10 survivor candidates as the world reels from war, and humanity faces extinction!
Sweet Rewards
A hurdle some PCVs in Ecuador face is low English fluency throughout their school and speaking timidity across grade levels and among their teachers. Ecuador TEFL PCV Shaun Nesheim shares a strategy that works in his site.
Campus Challenges
Ecuadorian TEFL PCVs, and probably those in other countries, assist students and teachers alike in preparing to take the TOEFL or Cambridge exams to study abroad or to meet government requirements for teaching positions. Understanding U. S. college campus environments and vocabulary and the situations new students face is crucial to score well on a […]
Student Storytellers
StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization that records and archives on its website a wide variety of stories told by the protagonists, their families, and friends. The sometimes touching, funny, riveting, or surprising tales offer our TEFL and ESL students and fellow teachers insight into U. S. culture. Moreover, the recordings and transcripts provide written and […]
Skimming and Scanning
Skimming and scanning are critical academic skills that our students and teachers need to succeed throughout their careers. This post is another in our series on acquiring or honing academic skills.
How Often Do You…?
This post has instructions for a game that gives students practice asking questions using “How often do you…?” do a particular activity and answering the questions using adverbs of frequency.
Understanding the Speaker’s Attitude
The door to successful listening, especially understanding informal presentations and conversations, hangs on a number of hinges like utterances, useful expressions, idioms, pronunciation, tone of voice, facial expression and gestures (if video is available), and attitude. These components are often related and, as a whole, give listeners a clearer idea of what they have heard.
Vocabulary and Context Clues
ESL and EFL learners find many words they don’t understand in their reading. Rather than stopping to look up each new word in the dictionary, they can use context clues to guess the meaning of new vocabulary. This lesson, adapted from a Douglas Learning Centre handout, explains the clues students can use to ascertain meaning and become […]
Love on a Leash
While dogs, “man’s best friends,” have long occupied a special place in US homes, keeping a dog as a pet in Ecuador is a relatively new custom. Certainly dogs have worked in the fields for centuries, but many Ecuadorians and other peoples are unaware that dogs have a remarkable ability to bond with humans. This makes […]
Chance Encounters
This activity uses pictures of a wide range of people for whom students will write dialogues that might occur if the individuals had a chance meeting somewhere in the world. The lesson plan is adapted from one created by Allegra K. Troiano, Senior English Language Fellow (ELF), US Embassy.
Chicago Food Tour Cultural Exchange
We love food, especially food that stimulates and surprises! EFL students and teachers are usually surprised to learn that the US population comprises every nationality on Earth. Realizing how diverse our country is–waves of immigration have been our history–many EFL learners understand that our language varies across the nation, not to mention internationally. This lesson […]
Sharing the News(letter)
Asking your students to share news, culture, traditions, and life stories with students in the US by writing a newsletter (or creating a video) with a partner Peace Corps World Wise School is a rewarding experience for both sides.
Pastimes Mingle
In this activity and lesson plan, adapted from an article from the US Department of State’s English Teaching Forum 2014, No 2, students mingle and interact, in pairs and then with the rest of the class, as they discuss pastimes.
Idiomatic Expressions
Learning idioms is a challenge for any second language learner as they vary: by the country and even the region in which the language is spoken; over time and with new ideas and technologies; and by the context in which they are used. Students usually have a lot of fun ascertaining the meanings, and teachers can […]
Spelling Bee Guide
Several Peace Corps Ecuador TEFL volunteers orchestrated a regional spelling bee, which the students and school staff loved. The spelling bee required much planning and practice, but what good things don’t?
English Club Monster Mash
English clubs are part of the Ecuadorian curriculum, and, of course, many EFL teachers around the world start English clubs to give students an opportunity to have fun while learning the language. Successful club activities require planning and preparation and should have objectives, just as our lesson plans do. Here we offer some activites based on […]
Simple Past and Present Perfect Activity
This activity helps students review the difference between simple past and present perfect by asking and answering questions using both tenses.
Vocab Scavenger Hunt
Using realia is a proven way to teach vocabulary, especially to beginners. Teachers can present the vocabulary in chunks of related objects, e.g., kitchen utensils, over a series of classes based on the class language learning level. The finale will be a scavenger hunt to review the vocabulary presented during the week or unit. This […]
Phrasal Verb “Break”
English sometimes seems silly to ESL and EFL learners. We have a lot of rules, but we also like to break those rules. We have those confounding phrasal verbs (verb + preposition or particle) that form a single phrase that may have more than one meaning. The meaning of the phrasal verb often cannot be […]
Teaching Useful Expressions
Informal English conversations are often chockful of utterances and expressions whose meanings are not defined in a dictionary. This lesson plan includes strategies (using voice intonation, facial expression, body language, and repetition) to convey the meaning and intention of the speakers in our textbook dialogues.
Dressing Up at the Farm
Ecuadorian students love to draw and certainly follow fashion trends via their favorite celebrities. In this lesson, we set our their imaginations free drawing clothing and personal accessories on farm animals. Then the students name each item alongside their artwork.
Teach Like A PCV 