ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING
Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
This month’s edition of Ideas for E.L.L’s celebrates the holidays — Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, even winter break — but, of course, just as you can pick, choose and adapt ideas from previous posts in this series, much of what we suggest below can be taught any time of year.
For more holiday lesson ideas, multimedia, crosswords, Student Opinion questions and more, check out The Learning Network’s full collection,The Spirit of the Season
Interactives
Drawing, Writing and Speaking About Important Holiday ‘Objects’
Ask students to write down a list of holidays that are important in their families. Then, explain that often there are particular objects that are important in celebrating those holidays, whether decorations, costumes, food, games or other kinds of things.
Next, show students the interactive “Handed-Down Holidays,” in which Times Op-Ed editors asked six artists about the things that define the season for them. Read the text below each object aloud. After the slide show, ask students to write down as many important objects from their own families as they can next to each of the holidays they listed.
Explain that you want them to pick at least three of the objects (though beginning E.L.L.’s might choose fewer) and, on separate pieces of paper, begin five-minute drawings of each. (Tell students they will have more time to complete each later.)
After three timed segments of five minutes each, have students write a paragraph about each of the items. You might show the interactive again, and display your own examples. Depending on students’ English proficiency, simple “sentence frames” like these could offer support:
_________ is an important holiday in our home. It takes place (on or during)_________ and celebrates_________. This is a picture of a/an _________. It is _________ (color) and is _________(size). It is important to our celebration of _________ because __________________. I have many memories of it. One time __________________(describe a memory). Another time__________________(describe another memory).
Students can return to their drawings after their paragraphs are done and write final versions of their descriptions and memories on the same sheet. They can show classmates their pictures and read what they wrote about them in small groups. Or, try having them show and tell in “speed-dating” style, with students lined-up in two rows facing each other. One row moves down after every two or three minutes. Posters can then be hung on the classroom walls.
If you want to add some “ed tech” to this lesson, you can take photos of student drawings and upload them to Fotobabble or similar tools. There, students can record themselves reading their descriptions. Or, students could draw one or more of their objects, type their paragraphs, and hang them in a virtual public gallery with Flashpaint.
Another extension of this lesson might emphasize English oral proficiency by inviting students to add to their paragraphs after they have shared with a partner. Then, in what my colleagues and I call the “3-2-1″ activity (building on an idea from English teacher and writer Paul Nation), they again line up in “speed-dating” rows, this time with some key differences.
In this second round, students should talk for three minutes without their sheets. After three minutes, have them switch to the next person and try to express their main points in two minutes. Finally, have them choose a third partner and summarize in just one minute. You can read more about the activity’s logistics on my personal blog.
