ESL Activities for the Young Learner Online Classroom

Easy, little to no prep, ESL activities for the Young Learner online classroom

In my last blog we looked at speaking activities for the online classroom, this week we are going to look at some easy, little to no prep, ESL games for young learners online. Again, most of the classroom classics can be adapted and used in the virtual classroom. There are so many possibilities and games/activities can serve as many functions: a warmer, a book break, a review, or just something to wake the students (and teachers!) up a bit. They can also give students a boost in confidence and they certainly make English language learning more fun.

Songs and movement

The thought of dancing in front of a camera may fill some teachers with horror but the younger learners love it! It’s much easier to do in a classroom with the students rather than alone in your living room but throw those inhibitions away and get dancing. Supersimplesongs.com has a plethora of songs with movements and you can find a song for just about any topic, making it a great lead in / context setting for your lesson. It’s a great way to bring TPR to your lessons and as we all know, songs are an excellent tool to practice pronunciation, rhythm and connected speech which can help improve the most basic English.

What’s Missing? / Take one away

In a normal classroom, this activity is usually played with the teacher sticking flashcards to the board, the students memorising the flashcards then turning around whilst the teacher takes one away. The students then turn back and have to say what’s missing. This can be adapted, with a little bit of prep, for the online classroom by the teacher simply putting pictures onto a PowerPoint slide (or other presentation tool), the students then memorise the pictures and then the teacher stops sharing the screen whilst he/she takes deletes a picture from the presentation. When the teacher re-shares his/her screen, one picture is missing and the students have to shout out which one it is, with the winner winning a virtual point … or a virtual ice cream.

Find something…

This online activity is great to get students moving and it helps to practice listening skills and review vocabulary. The teacher simply asks the students to find something in the room that is a certain colour e.g. find something blue. Give the students 30 seconds or so to find something blue such as a pen, a jumper or anything. You can also ask students to look for something that starts with a specific letter e.g. find something that starts with C …

Word chain / snake

This is such an easy activity to do in class and is a great vocabulary builder which is important for English language learning. The teacher gives the students a category e.g. animals and writes a word on the whiteboard e.g. giraffe. The first student then has to think of a word starting with the last letter of that word and so on, e.g., student 1: elephant, student 2: tiger, student 3: rabbit.

The above are just a few examples of how you can make English language learning fun in the online classroom with little to no prep. The delivery may be a little different and it may take a little adjustment, but it will be worth it in the end.