30 Engaging ESL Lesson Plans

Learning a new language can be daunting. Get kids excited about mastering their developing language skills with these entertaining English lesson plan ideas. There’s a wide variety of worksheets and activities that cover everything from action verbs to common adjectives and pronouns. The printable materials can be adapted to suit any language level including advanced students.

1. Survival Guide

Help your students remember the basics. Cover daily greetings, school vocabulary, and parts of the calendar. Don’t forget to teach essential phrases such as “Where is the bathroom?”

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2. Alphabet Books

Build a strong foundation for your language goals by starting with the alphabet. Work on letter recognition and pronunciation or match words to beginning letters.

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3. Nursery Rhymes

Singing nursery rhymes makes language learning fun! Sing songs together to work on pronunciation and word recognition skills. For advanced students, why not let them pick a favorite pop song?

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4. Counting with Leaves

Start your ESL lessons with a numbers unit! Attach leaf-shaped slips of paper to a big paper tree and count the leaves of each color.

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5. Crazy Color Creatures

Examine colors with adorable monsters! Design a monster on different colored paper and place it around the room. Students can describe the monsters or arrange the colors in a rainbow.

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6. Vocabulary Centers

Once you’ve prepped these vocabulary centers, you can use them multiple times. Laminate sheets of paper to explore parts of speech such as verb tenses, adjectives, and pronouns.

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7. Verb Rainbows

Tackle the wide variety of verb tenses with this eye-catching craft! On colored paper, have students write a verb in different tenses before inviting them to form sentences. 

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8. Linking Verbs

This creative activity helps turn an abstract idea into a visual model. Students can visualize how linking verbs work in a sentence by creating these hands-on sentence chains.

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9. Past Tense Verb Sounds

Add a fun matching game to your grammar lesson plans. Kids will see the correct spelling of past tense verbs while learning how to pronounce them.

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10. Helping Verb Song

Tackle helping verbs with a fun song! Print this catchy song on sheets of construction paper so students can see how the verbs are spelled.

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11. Sentence Structures

Make your English lesson plans active! Students put themselves in the correct order to form a sentence before having a discussion about the different parts of a sentence such as nouns and verbs.

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12. Clothes Speaking Activity

Practice conversational skills by describing different types of wardrobes. This activity is great for targeting colors, comparative adjectives, and seasonal vocabulary.

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13. Apples to Apples Vocabulary Game

Enliven class time with a super fun game! Ask a question and have students vote on their favorite response. Perfect for working on interrogatives, adjectives, and nouns.

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14. What Am I

Study adjectives and action verbs with a guessing game. You can use specific topic cards or practice describing pictures cut out from magazines.

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15. Conversation Board Games

Keep students engaged with your lesson plans through fun conversation games! Challenge them to use background knowledge of the topic to win the game.

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16. Food Vocabulary

This reader worksheet is a fantastic way to wrap up a food unit or review common adjectives! Students can work independently or read the prompts in groups.

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17. Describing Food

Food is a favorite lesson topic among English language teachers and students. Review common adjectives by writing and talking about students’ favorite foods.

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18. Body Parts

Head, shoulders, knees, and toes! Use these worksheets to ensure that students are meeting lesson aims about body parts.

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19. Emotions

Give your learners the tools to discuss their feelings and express themselves. Print these emotions on sheets of paper and have students share how they feel each day.

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20. Occupations

In this lesson, students draw slips of paper to practice the names of occupations along with their spelling. Bonus points for describing the uniforms!

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21. Introducing Myself

Start your lessons by having students talk about themselves! Study phrases and vocabulary students can use to introduce themselves to their peers.

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22. If Conversations

Expand students’ fluency with “If” conversation cards. Adapt the cards to suit your learners’ language level. Add blank cards for students to write their own questions.

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23. Question Words

Questions are essential to building language skills. Challenge advanced students to respond to questions with a question and see who can last the longest. 

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24. Daily Routines

Talk about daily routines by having students arrange the pieces of paper to share their daily schedules. For extra practice, have them present another student’s routines to the class.

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25. House and Furniture 

Add an entertaining game to language class time and boost vocabulary knowledge at the same time! Great for meeting household vocabulary language objectives.

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26. Pronouns Song

Learn all about the difference between nouns and pronouns. Sung to the tune of the SpongeBob theme song, kids will love this pronouns song!

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27. Picture Dictionary

Allow students to make connections between words through themes. Cut up old magazines for them to create their own picture dictionaries.

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28. Let’s Talk

Teach your students useful conversational phrases. Place the colorful pieces of paper around the room to create specific topic conversation corners.

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29. Common Adjectives

This common adjective-matching game is a fun way to introduce kids to descriptive words. You can also find specific adjective types organized into groups.

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30. Comparative Adjectives

Knowing how to compare objects is super important! Use the pictures on the worksheets to build confidence in using and understanding comparative adjectives.  

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