A lesson plan and a pack of worksheets

What should I teach tomorrow at the English club?

 It’s 9:00 on a Friday night and you realize that you still haven’t prepped for your teaching lesson at the community English club tomorrow morning where you will be teaching 15 energetic 10 year-olds.

The hardest thing is usually not deciding on what to teach, but finding the necessary materials or worksheets that are needed for the lesson. It’s easy enough to decide to teach about farm animals, or fruits, or transportation. But what about fleshing out the lesson and giving the children some practice with the new vocabulary that they learned? Here are some ideas.

Let’s pick the topic of fruit. First of all, you introduce the fruit, perhaps by using flashcards, perhaps by drawing pictures on the board. Depending on the focus, and on the level of the students, you might have them write the words down on a piece of paper.

Next, after reviewing the vocabulary several times, you can play upset the fruit basket to help with listening practice and becoming familiar with the sound of the words. This you can do by assigning a fruit to each child. If you have chairs, set the chairs in a circle with one student in the middle of the circle. All the chairs are full. (If you don’t have chairs, you might be able to mark seats on the floor using tape or chalk, depending on your surroundings.) Once everyone is set up, you as the caller will call the names of several fruits. Anybody with those fruits needs to get up and find a new chair (which should not be the chair beside them). The loner in the middle will have to rush to find a new seat before they are filled again. The new person that does not have a seat will have to stand in the middle as you call the names of the fruits again. As a change-up, you can also say, “Upset the Fruit Basket” in which everyone will have to find a new chair. A downside to this game is that it can be very rowdy and very hard on chairs.

If you want to incorporate some speaking in a lesson, you can play a game similar to hot potato. Have the children sit in a circle. As you play music, they will pass the fruit flashcards around the circle. Once the music stops, whoever has a flashcard with fruit on it will have to use the fruit in a sentence. This can be a sentence like: “I like strawberries.” Or, “This is a kiwi.” Or, “An orange is better than a banana.” Depending on the level, you can give them a pattern for their sentence, in which they read the sentence and then fill in the missing words with the name of the fruit they hold. This lessens the terror of speaking English for low-level learners.

Worksheets or “stay in your seat games” are often the best way to finish off a class. This way you can get the class calmed down and focused after a rowdy game of Upset the Fruit Basket. As each student is finished with their worksheet, they can bring it to you to check and then be dismissed from the class. This also offers an incentive to slower students to get their worksheets done.

We are offering on our website a pack of fruit worksheets here. Included in this pack are both basic fruit names and tropical fruit names. These worksheets include filling in correct word under the picture, crossword puzzles, matching letters from the name of the fruit to the picture, filling in missing letters, or writing about likes and dislikes. For the latter, we offer both an easier version and a more difficult one.

This pack also contains a fruit gameboard that can be printed and played with dice or a spinner. The students compete with each other to see who can get to the end of the path first. This game is valuable in that it includes other English phrases such as “Go forward 4 spaces,” or “Go back 2 spaces.” It also provides an atmosphere to practice talking English with the teacher.

Click on the link and check out the worksheets! It gives you the option of viewing the worksheets up close before making the decision whether or not you want to buy it.

Stay tuned for more updates on new worksheets as we release them.