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ESL Valentine's Day, President's Day, and Groundhog Day resources that are designed specifically for English Language Learners!
Click on the pictures to explore the resources futher!
Valentine's Day Bingo & Vocabulary Activities ❤️ Bingo is wonderful, easy-to-play game for English Language Learners. You don't have to worry about complicated rules or the game being too old/too young for a particular group of students. Bingo is super easy to understand and is great for ALL ages. I have played Bingo with little ones learning to identify the ABCs in English by their sound (or sight) and I've played it with high school ELLs who were learning American Halloween vocabulary. It's truly fun for everyone.
This Valentine's Day Bingo activity teaches ESL students the holiday vocabulary so that they can start to identify and talk about the things they are seeing around them. Being able to describe one's experiences and world is a crucial skill for ESL students. In addition to Bingo, this activity pack includes vocabulary cards to pre-teach the new words, little writing prompts to practice the spelling, and a make-your-own Valentine craftivity. Although it's best in color, you can also easily print in black and white if your district doesn't allow color printing.
Book-based Valentine's lesson--reading comprehension 📚
Books about Valentine's Day, love, and kindness are also a great lesson idea for ESL students! I use YouTube a lot for book read alouds if I don't have the book readily available or if it's checked out at the library. I give my students comprehension questions to go along with the book and usually some kind of writing or speaking prompt as well.
This Valentine's Day book, "I Need a Hug," by Aaron Blabey, is absolutely adorable! It's comprehensible to even Newcomer ELLs and involves the cutest little porcupine! I created a TPT product to accompany this book. There are vocabulary cards to pre-teach the key words from the story, comprehension questions (worded in simple, beginner-friendly language), and a differentiated writing activity (2 versions--one with sentence frames and one without). The writing activity also includes a cute little coloring activity as well. *Extra bonus: the read aloud is also in Spanish, should you want to read it in both languages. I have both linked on the TPT product page for you.
President's Day Reading Comprehension and Craftivity (multi-level, Newcomer through Advanced) 🏛️
February has so many fun, teachable topics! Presidents Day is another lesson that is great to do with ESL students because you can teach about United States history, why the students have a day off from school, and more! Additionally, teaching about Presidents Day can help support language learners with core content from their social studies classes.
However, it can be a tricky thing to teach because ESL students may be coming into the country with little-to-no knowledge of American history. Because of this, I created a multi-level Presidents Day resource for my kids (4 levels). This resource has Newcomer, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced level readings and comprehension questions about Presidents Day.
For the newcomer level, sentence frames and pictures are included to support comprehension. A craftivity/classroom decor activity is also included.
Groundhog Day Reading and Comprehension Questions (Newcomer) 🐿️
Americans use a groundhog to predict the weather? What's a groundhog? Can I have one as a pet? These are all some questions my ESL kiddos gave me when I told them about Groundhog Day! Admittedly, they are fair questions! What on Earth is this holiday about?!
I designed a beginner-level Groundhog Day activity pack for ESL students to help them understand what this whole groundhog business is about. It tied in really nicely to my current unit on using the simple future tense (will + infinitive verb). After reading and answering questions about the silly holiday, students wrote down their predictions about whether the groundhog will see his shadow or not and what that will mean for the weather. This is also a great activity for a weather unit. This resource comes with vocabulary cards, a reading, comprehension questions, a writing prompt, and coloring pages.
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