Category Archives: Ideas for Class

Make It Merry: Creative Christmas activities for learners

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As we approach December, Christmas trees are going up, presents are being wrapped, the smell of chestnuts fills the air, and we can almost hear the jingle bells ringing in the distance. Whilst filling our classrooms with good will and cheer we also need a little spark. We can’t just roll out the same Christmas lessons, year after year. Thankfully, here at Pearson we’ve got your back. Start the festive season with 24 fresh ideas for teacher’s little helpers from our digital advent calendar.

There are 24 ideas to keep your classroom merry and bright all season long. Each activity is designed to encourage creativity, foster meaningful connections. They also promote sustainable habits that students can carry into the new year. These activities are just a taste of what awaits in our digital advent calendar

We’ll have a look at three of them in today’s post, but for the other 21 you’ll have to head over here.

1. Handmade Gifts: Create a Memory Box

We all know that Christmas is about giving but it shouldn’t be about the most expensive thing you can find in the shops. It should be a time to focus on thoughtfulness and what better way than making handmade gifts?

In this first activity, students can create a personalised memory box to gift someone special.
This activity encourages creativity, reflection, and the joy of giving something unique.
Encourage students to think carefully about the recipient. What memories do they share? What little trinkets or notes would mean something special? They could include things like small mementos, photos, handwritten notes, or tokens from shared outings. For example, a ticket stub from a movie they watched together, a dried flower, or even a small object like a keychain can become a sentimental addition. This activity encourages creativity, reflection, and the joy of giving something truly unique.

Not only does this exercise help students focus on the thoughtfulness of gift-giving, but it also develops their storytelling and fine motor skills as they decide how to decorate and arrange the items.

Watch this video tutorial for inspiration and tips on guiding students through the process.

2. Sustainable Christmas Checklist

With environmental sustainability in mind, this activity introduces students to eco-friendly practices they can follow during the holiday season. Using the Sustainable Christmas Checklist, students can explore simple actions like using recycled wrapping paper, making their own decorations, and conserving energy by turning off holiday lights when they’re not in use.

This activity not only makes the holidays greener but also teaches lifelong habits of environmental responsibility.

3. Make Pop-Up Christmas Cards

Finally, our last activity is all about bringing a touch of 3D magic to the holiday season with pop-up Christmas cards. These cards are a fun, hands-on craft that students can personalize and share with family and friends. By following this video guide, they’ll learn to make simple, festive designs that pop out when the card is opened. This is a great way to practice fine motor skills, encourage creativity, and add a personal touch to holiday greetings.

If you look closely, you’ll also find a smart way to upcycle some materials and make the perfect card for your students’ friends and families, hidden away inside the calendar.

Remind your students to think about the message they want to include inside the card. This is a great opportunity for them to reflect on what they’re grateful for this season or to share a holiday wish. These pop-up cards are a heartfelt way for students to connect with loved ones, adding a personal touch that can’t be bought in stores.

What Else?

As you bring these ideas into your classroom, we hope they’ll spark joy and create lasting memories for both you and your students. Happy holidays, and here’s to a festive season filled with warmth, creativity, and a little extra magic!

Which door do you think these activities will be hiding behind and what else is in store?

Spook-tacular classroom activities for a fang-tastic Halloween

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As the spooky season creeps up on us like a ghost in the night, why not bring a little Halloween magic into the classroom? Whether you’re looking to trick your students into learning with a bit of treat-worthy fun, or you’re brewing up some activities that will make their skills rise from the dead, we’ve got you covered. Don’t be afraid, these activities won’t come back to haunt you—though they might scare up some serious engagement!

Unearth the History of Halloween

photograph by Powell Krueger

Underneath the sweets and scary costumes, Halloween has a rich history dating back to ancient times. Why not turn your classroom into a time-traveling crypt where students explore the haunted roots of this holiday? Split students into groups, each tasked with investigating one aspect of Halloween history—be it the Celtic festival of Samhain, the rise of Halloween in the U.S., or the origin of costumes and jack-o’-lanterns. Have each group create a ghostly news report or boo-tiful visual timeline to present their findings.

For a modern twist, challenge your students to create a short, engaging social media post (photo or video) summarizing their research. Think: 30-second TikTok video or something along those lines. They can use props and costumes to recreate historical scenes or make their own “haunted history” presentations.

A Green and Sustainable Halloween

Even witches and ghosts care about sustainability these days, especially dinosaur ghosts who hate seeing fossil fuels being used so much!

For this activity, challenge your students to think about how they can celebrate Halloween in an eco-friendly way. Start with a discussion on common Halloween practices. Things like costumes, decorations, eating endless amounts of sweets and chocolate and their environmental impact.

Next ask students to brainstorm and design their own “Green Halloween.” They could come up with costume ideas made from recycled materials, eco-friendly party decorations, or suggestions for low-waste treats. Have students present their ideas to the class in a “Green Halloween Fair.” They can even vote on the best ideas, giving out fang-tastic prizes.

Turn this into a creative writing task! Students can create a flyer or social media post advertising their sustainable Halloween ideas, complete with catchy slogans and imagery. This is a great way to practice persuasive language while raising awareness.

Monstrously Mundane: Halloween Characters in Everyday Situations

What happens when your favourite Halloween characters have to deal with the same everyday problems we do? In this imaginative and humorous activity, students will take classic Halloween figures—like vampires, witches, and ghosts—and place them in totally ordinary, un-spooky situations.

Provide students with three images of typical Halloween characters (like a vampire, a witch, and a ghost). Have them brainstorm how these characters would act in an everyday scenario, such as:

  • A vampire at the bank, complaining about the opening hours because they can only visit after dark.
  • A witch at the supermarket, frustrated because they can’t find any eye of newt in the spice aisle.
  • A ghost trying to book a flight online, but struggling because they can’t select a seat, as they no longer exist.

I like to generate these images using AI and ask my students what they think the prompt may have been. Let students, either use the images and characters crated above or ask them to  create their own.

Once students have chosen their characters and scenarios, they can either write a short story or create a dialogue between the characters and other people in the scene. Encourage them to use humour, develop comics and perhaps even act out their scenes for the class.

Reading

If writing isn’t whats on your agenda in spooky season maybe you’re looking to get your students into reading. There are a whole host of readers available for check them out here. For more Reading ideas check out Liz Beer’s article from last halloween

With these spine-tingling ideas, your students will be learning and laughing while they embrace the eerie season. Not only do these activities cover key language skills, but they also let students show off their creativity in frighteningly fun ways. Plus, by sneaking in some lessons on history and sustainability, you’re giving them a more scream-worthy Halloween experience. Don’t forget to check out Pearson Readers for even more boo-rilliant resources to sink your teeth into!

Back-to-School bright ideas!

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Another wonderful academic year is on the horizon, so here are some bright ideas to help you get organized and have fun with your new students:

1. GET AHEAD WITH YOUR PLANNING

Depending on your situation, you may know ahead of time what books and resources you’ll be using this year. Block off a few mornings before starting your year to get to know your course book. You can think about how to make tasks easier or harder, how to turn some sections into more communicative or game-based activities. You can spend time looking up resources or finding ideas on the Internet. So much happens in the first few weeks of class that spending time earlier getting this done is vital.

 2.  THINK ABOUT ASSESSMENT 

If you do know your course book ahead of time, think about which sections of the book you will use to assess your students, and how. Will you be doing a test at the start of the year to see what their level is like? Will you use mini tasks from the book every four weeks to assess progress in some areas? Does the course book come with assessment already built into its resources?

3. A WELCOMING SPACE

If you are permanently teaching in the same space every day, think about the decoration of your class. Can you put up colourful paper on the walls ready to show off students’ work in the future? Could you label in English some essential vocabulary, e.g. drawers, board, light switch. Can you put up posters that will help students with their English on the first day, such as useful phrases? If you are moving around to different rooms, perhaps you can keep some posters in your folder that can be transported from room to room and easily displayed.

5. DAY ONE AND WEEK ONE ICE BREAKERS 

It is important to get to know your students, and for students to get to know each other, to build up a good bond for the year. The first days are the time to test out the rules, expectations and rhythm of the class so that when you start to teach from the course book, the class will go a lot smoother as students will know what is expected of them. The first few days are also wonderful because everyone is excited to be back and school and is looking forward to what the academic year will bring. Here are a few ice breaker bright ideas to try out:

  • Summer break slideshow

Students can make a short presentation of 5 slides maximum showcasing what they did on their summer holidays using photos they took on their phones. Set a criteria, such as: best photo, best meal, best item you saw, best photo of you, the funniest photo and they talk through what they did on their holidays. Using presentation software such as PowerPoint, Prezi or Pitch can be useful. Challenge the listeners to come up with one question to ask the presenter after the presentation. A much faster version of this for day one could be to use the app Photo Roulette where students guess who took which photo.

Back to School bright ideas

Happy kids in sunglasses sitting at table on birthday party at summer garden and eating cupcakes

  • Get to know the teacher

Students love to find out facts about their teachers, so you can use this to help them practice their English and get to know you a little more. You could and ask a student to come and take an item. Then, students speculate with their partner or groups as to why this item is significant. For example, in the bag might be a small plastic toy dog, which shows you have a pet, an orange because it is your favourite fruit, and so on. To make this more movement based, designate one wall of your classroom as ‘true’, and the opposite as ‘false’ (use posters). Then, state some information about yourself and students run to the wall they think is the answer.

  • Student questionnaire

To assess reading and writing, you can ask students to fill in a question and answer paper on day one. For example, what is their favourite movie, music group, food etc. Then, for day two, you can prepare a ‘find someone who’ game based on the questionnaire answers.

  • Last person standing

Make sure students are sat at their desks in a rows and columns pattern.Tell one column (from front to back line) to stand up. Everyone else remains seated. Ask a question (it is best to prepare a long list of questions before class). Example questions: What’s this? How old are you? Only the students that are standing can answer the questions. If they know the answer they put their hand up. Ask one student with their hand up the answer (not necessarily in column order, try to make it random along the column). If they are correct they can sit down. Keep going until there is only one student stood up. Now the row of that student stands up and the game begins all over again. It’s a great way to bond and to review and test out what English your students know already.

  • Student parameters

Ask students to line up according to different criteria, for example ‘tallest to shortest’ ‘longest hair to shortest hair’ ‘shoe size’ ‘rainbow order t-shirts’. Time students – can they beat their time with each new criteria?

  • Question swap

Prepare some cards with some questions on, e.g. What are you looking forward to most this year? What would you do if you were suddenly a millionaire? Then, give each student in your class one question card face down.  I tell them not to look until each student has a card.  Once everyone is ready, students will move freely around the room to find another student in order to ask them the question on their card.  After they answer, that student will then ask the question on their card as well.  When both students have successfully asked and answered each of their questions, they trade cards and move around the room again to find someone new.  The goal is to ask, answer, and trade cards as many times as possible so they can meet all of their classmates.  It’s a perfect activity for teachers to join in as well.

Good luck and enjoy this new school year!

Fresh & Festive Ideas for your Teen Classes

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Festive ideas

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. We can almost hear the sleigh bells ringing. Home Alone is on the TV. There are endless perfume adverts and we all want to eat our own body weight in Christmas goodies.

It’s been a long first term and to be honest, we’re all VERY tired. We’ve finished our exams and we just want to throw on Netflix, relax and wait for the three wise men to bring us lots of presents.

We already know what Mariah wants for Christmas so why not leave the Christmas song gap fills in Santas sack? Looking for some video inspiration?

Now, you might not win “El Gordo” this year but In today’s post we’ve got the next best thing.  We’re giving you 4 Christmas class ideas to keep your teens motivated until they’ve opened the last window on their advent calendar.

A Gift from afar

Here’s an idea we developed everyone’s favourite Youtube teacher Charlie’s Lessons. It all comes from the idea that the people of Oslo donate a huge Christmas tree to Trafalgar Square every year. (This video explains why)

After watching the video allocate students in the class a random city around the world. Ask your students to research the city a little and see what gift they would send them from your home town. Then ask the students to suggest what gift that city might send in return.

For example we landed on Nashville Tennessee. It soon became clear that Nashville is the home of Country music. So our gift to them would be a set of castanets. We could send them with a “How to play castanets” video or guide.

In return Nashville could send us a fancy neon guitar sign or something from the wonderful celebration of Tomatoes, The annual Tomato Art Fest.

If you want to take this one step further, why not get in touch with a school in your random city and exchange some ideas about each other’s hometown at Christmas?

Santa’s Sustainable Christmas

We’ve already written our letters to the Three Wise men and Santa. Telling them we’ve behaved well all year; asking for a new iPhone or more socks than a centipede could use. Why don’t we send Santa a letter asking for him to make a real difference in the world?

Amidst the excitement of Christmas, the tradition of writing letters to Santa often revolves around material desires and personal wishes. However, as teachers of English as a second language, we have a unique opportunity to instill in our students a sense of global responsibility and sustainability.

Encouraging our students to write a sustainable letter to Santa can foster empathy and awareness about real-world issues. Instead of solely focusing on personal wants, this exercise prompts them to consider the bigger picture. Students can express their concerns about the environment, advocate for social causes, or suggest ways in which Santa, the symbol of giving, can contribute to making the world a better place.

This activity not only enhances language skills but also cultivates a sense of agency in students. By channeling their wishes into requests for positive change, they learn the power of their voices and the impact of collective action, instilling values that transcend the holiday season.

Snow Balls

Is there anything more exhilarating than a snowball fight? I didn’t think so. Imagine capturing that excitement in a super-fast, low-prep classroom activity that ingeniously repurposes those old, seemingly endless scraps of paper.

Start by prompting your students to jot down their heartfelt Christmas wishes on these pieces of paper. As the wishes accumulate, the anticipation heightens. Then, in the spirit of a lively snowball fight, crumple these papers into balls and let them fly across the classroom in a flurry of hope and joy.

Free Snowball Fight Winter photo and picture

https://pixabay.com/photos/snowball-fight-winter-snow-snowy-589668/

The real magic begins when the flurry settles. Students embark on a quest, picking up the scattered wishes. The challenge? To unravel the crumpled pieces and, with curiosity and camaraderie, decipher whose wish they hold. This lively interaction not only recycles paper but also encourages students to engage actively in forming questions, fostering a playful yet educational atmosphere.

For instance, imagine a student unraveling a wish that reads, “I wish for a world with no hunger.” They turn to their peers, querying, “Hi Pepe, do you wish for a world with no hunger?” Another might discover a wish for “A new map on fortnite,” sparking a round of inquiries to uncover the wishmaker.

Cracker Jokes

Free Celebration Christmas photo and picture

https://pixabay.com/photos/celebration-christmas-decoration-83158/

The best thing about Christmas dinner isn’t the food is it? No, it’s the terrible Christmas cracker jokes. Start by presenting a few classic Christmas cracker jokes to your students. These often feature playful wordplay and puns. Encourage students to read and discuss the jokes together, identifying the humor and the wordplay elements embedded within them.

Guide them through the process of dissecting the jokes:

  1. Identify Wordplay: Break down the jokes to highlight the double meanings, homophones, or clever twists in the language used.
  2. Explain the Humour: Discuss why the jokes are funny and how the wordplay contributes to the humour. Help students understand the cultural context if necessary.
    1. “What do you get if you cross Santa with a duck? A Christmas Quacker!”
      • Deconstruction: This joke cleverly plays with words that sound similar but have different meanings. It uses a pun on “Quacker” (a sound a duck makes) and “Cracker” (a traditional festive item). By combining “Santa” and “Quacker,” it creates the humorous image of a Christmas-themed duck, merging the idea of Santa Claus with the quacking sound, resulting in a playful and pun-filled phrase: “Christmas Quacker.”
    2. “Who is Santa’s favorite singer? Elf-is Presley!”
      • Deconstruction: This joke relies on a play on words and a clever twist. It combines “Elf” (Santa’s helper) with “Elvis Presley” (a famous singer), creating a wordplay fusion, “Elf-is Presley.” This wordplay substitutes “Elvis” with “Elf,” humorously suggesting that Santa’s favorite singer would be a play on the famous musician’s name, indicating the mythical Elf as the preferred singer.

    If your students are feeling brave why not go on to step three and get them to Create Their Own Jokes: After analysing a few jokes, encourage students to try their hand at crafting their own Christmas cracker jokes. Provide prompts or examples to help kickstart their creative process.

As we wrap up these festive activities, may your days be merry and bright and filled with warmth. Wishing you all a Christmas  – where laughter sparkles like tinsel and joy resonates like the sound of sleigh bells. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Hair-raisingly good Halloween English Reader activities

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Halloween reading activities

Halloween is just around the corner, and it is a wickedly wonderful way to encourage your older teen and adult students to broaden their vocabulary, consolidate their grammar and practice their reading skills by using classic horror or thriller English Readers in class. Pearson has a collection of more than 300 Pearson English Readers which are easy to use and contain lots of extra materials.

Some spook-tacular Halloween selections from the classic English Readers are:

  • The Phantom of the Opera
  • Dracula
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles
  • Dr Faustus
  • Hamlet
  • The Locked Room and other horror stories
  • Misery
  • Tales of Mystery and Imagination
  • The Canterville Ghost and other stories

If you want to use a Reader with your students in class, for Halloween or for any time of the year, here are some ideas to compliment the book.

Word Lists

Every Pearson Reader has a word list at the back of the book that gives a brief definition of the essential vocabulary used. Use these lists to design a ‘treasure hunt’ style game. For example:

Find:

  1. Three animals
  2. Two jobs
  3. Two places for dead people

After students have read the story, you can also play a quiz game where you read out a definition of a word and students buzz in and tell you the answer. Alternatively, another fun revision game is that you say a word and students must come up with a grammatically correct sentence using that word to win. It’s a fun way to practice new vocabulary.

Character Conversations

Once you have started to read the book with your students and the characters have been introduced, you can ask students to imagine that they are some of the characters in the book and to have a conversation with each other. For example, in the story Dracula, the Doctor comes to visit Lucy as she is under the spell of Dracula and is acting strange. A dialogue may look like this:

Student A: You are Dr Seward. Ask questions about how Lucy is feeling.

Student B: You are Lucy’s father, Arthur. Explain how Lucy is feeling.

Conversations can also take place between characters in the form of Instant Messaging, or mobile phone text messages. Students can collaborate on a shared document, such as Google docs, and read and respond in real time to their classmates’ messages. You can also do this via traditional pen and paper messages.

Another conversation practice can be character interviews. Student A is a very famous TV talk show host and invites one of the characters from the book on to their show for an interview. Student B is one of the characters. Students can prepare the questions together before acting out the dialogue.

Radio Plays

Ask your students to recreate the entire story, a chapter or part of the story in the form of a radio play. They not only have to be the characters but they also have to be foley artists. If you have permission from the students and/or parents, you can record them performing! Give students plenty of time to prepare their dialogues, scripts and find the props they need to make the sounds. If students are watching each other, provide some listening activity for the audience to do, such as:

Watch your classmates perform their radio play.

  • What did you like the best?
  • What sound effect was the most realistic?
  • Was their dialogue accurate from the book?
  • What was your favourite line?

Creative Writing

Try to find opportunities in the story to encourage different writing styles. For example, in Dracula, we could set these tasks:

  1. You are Dracula trying to sell your castle. Write a description of it.
  2. You work for the police. You want to tell people about the dangers of vampires. Write a report answering these questions: How will I know if a person is a vampire? What should I do if I see one?
  3. You are Jonathon and you have just spent the first night in Dracula’s castle. You send a text message to your fiancée Mina. Arrived safely. Dracula v. strange. J xx. Reply as Mina and then continue the conversation between them both.
  4. The book publisher wants you to write a 100-word description for the back of the book that will encourage people in the 21st Century to read it – careful, do not reveal the ending of the story!

Personalisation

Many of these Readers are suitable for Halloween because they play on our fears. Some are supernatural, such as vampires or werewolves, but others are more real, such as locked rooms or insects. Personalising questions either before students read the text or after is a great way to either build anticipation or check understanding of the story, and it helps students to use quite specific vocabulary. For example, in the short story The Ash Tree, we can ask our students before they read:

Which of these situations would frighten you most?

A You are walking alone in an open field at night. You see a black shape with two very bright eyes.

B You are driving along a road on a stormy night. Tall trees on each side of the road are moving wildly.

Or in The Barrel of Amontillado before students read:

This story involves a slow death and a barrel of expensive wine. Discuss how the person might die.

and in The Locked Room after the students have read it, we can discuss and speculate what we might do in the same situation:

Imagine you have just been into the locked room for the first time. You saw the clothes move and you heard the steps behind the door. What will you do now? Talk to another student.

Debates

Debate

Debates are great because not only do students practice speaking but they also have to give logical reasons as to why they are defending a particular idea, which is a very useful skill to have. We can choose to have a two-sided debate, such as after reading The Phantom of the Opera, the debate could be:

The mayor of Paris and the Captain of Police wants to tear down the Opera House after the recent scandals, but the locals want to protect the historical and beautiful building.

The class then splits 50/50 and they prepare their ideas and arguments before debating. Alternatively, the debate can be character based with multiple opinions. For example, after reading Faust, the debate could be:

In groups of five, imagine and act out this scene. The characters are:

  • The Pope
  • The army officer
  • The King of Germany
  • The Duke of Vanholt
  • Robin

A world organization thinks that Faustus should receive its top international prize for his services to science. Do you agree? Make short speeches and then have a discussion.

Halloween is the perfect time in the academic year to introduce readers to your class if you have not done so already. The Pearson Readers form part of the ‘Connected English Learning Program’ as it is part of the vast resources available to help your students to learn English through topics they love.

Life hacks for online teachers

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Life Hacks for Online Teachers

The digitalisation of education was already in motion even before the events of this year, which has seen more and more classes taught online or in blended scenarios. The transition brings with it great opportunities for innovation, but it’s certainly not without its challenges, too! We’re sometimes spoilt for choice with a plethora of digital tools and platforms and apps with ‘bells and whistles’ so there’s a lot to be said for taking a step back and focusing on what’s important. In this blog post I’d like to share some of the ‘life hacks’ I’ve learned as an online teacher which I hope will help simplify and make more efficient your digital teaching lives…

*Should you wish to delve deeper into this topic, check out the webinar I delivered – you can access the recording and slides at the Pearson teacher training hub

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To Translate or Not to Translate: That is the Question

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Guest post by: Karen McGhie

Karen McGhie is Head of Teacher Training and Development at London School in San Sebastian. She will be speaking on Embracing Translation in the Classroom with her colleague Iñigo Casis at the 3rd Annual ELT Conference in San Sebastian on March 30th.

‘Teacher, he’s molesting me!’ Imagine my reaction when, as a newly qualified English teacher in Spain with very little knowledge of Spanish, I was confronted by this comment from a 10-year-old student. Little did I realise back then what an important false friend this was in English and how many times I would have to remind students of this mis-translation in my subsequent years of teaching (and will have to for many years to come).

Ok, so after that trip down memory lane, let’s kick things off with a little quiz. Are you ready?

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Five techy tricks to practice your English over the summer

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Picking up a book, writing a pen-friend or doing a language exchange in English are all tried and tested ways to keep improving and practicing your English over the summer months.  In fact I would suggest them all to my students and many of the activities below are based on them in one way or another. But with the devices and tech tools available to our learners I thought I would put a bit of a spin on the typical summer learning ideas.

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Once upon a time: 10 story activities for the primary classroom

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Children love stories! Stories appeal to their vivid sense of imagination and appetite for fantasy. They help children understand and accept their own feelings and are a vehicle to teach values and about other cultures. And from a language perspective, they are a rich source of vocabulary and structures in context and lend themselves to both serious and enjoyable learning for our pupils.

In this blog post we will consider 10 classroom-ready activities to use alongside stories in the classroom. These are divided into three sections: before reading, while reading and post-reading

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Top games for helping our Spanish-speaking students’ pronunciation (Part 1)

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If you have taught English to Spanish speakers for a while, I’m sure you already have an idea of what the main pronunciation problems for them are. As a teacher of English and native speaker of Spanish, I have not only experienced those problems myself but also have always tried to help my students with effective and engaging techniques that I will be explaining in this post.

Below, you can find some of most problematic pronunciation areas for Spanish speakers (take a look at the Speakout Study Booster for Spanish speakers)  and how to get around them in class by using games.

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