studentAge range: 6 –  10

Use it to introduce English vocabulary such as:

Pick an area of the world to focus on, and use the various countries in that area. As an example, if you choose Western Europe you could use –

Europe

England

France

Ireland

Holland

Italy

Spain

etc.

Required Materials:

white cardboard poster paper

colored construction paper

scissors

glue, double sided tape, and/or velcro strips

markers, pens, and colored pencils

Instructions:

To get started place the first piece of white cardboard or paper on the table. Then cut out shapes that resemble a speech bubble or a cloud with the colored poster paper. Cut out as many as you like. On half of them, using a thick marker, pen or colored pencil, write names of different countries such as France, Germany, and Italy. On the other half jot out the countries’ respective languages.

You should now have a base piece of cardboard or white paper, colored paper with country names, and colored paper with their various languages. Glue all of the countries on the cardboard. You can do it in an organized way or randomly. Next, if you are using velcro strips, you will want to attached one half of the strips to the countries. If you are not using velcro, just skip this step.

Now attach the other half of the velcro to the backs of the various language cards you made earlier. If you are not using velcro, you can use double sided tape, but be extra careful if you think that you will want to reuse the material.

You can now use this as a teaching prop, or if you want to decorate more, that’s OK too. The concept is to teach both the names of countries  and their respective languages while making the materials, and then reviewing the new vocabulary by using them as a guessing game . The English student or students have to match the language with its country. You can even show that some countries have languages similar to their name such as French in France, German in Germany, English in England.

This is a very common style of teaching TEFL classes, especially in Asia. As you can see here, activity based teaching, or student centered teaching, is how most language classrooms operate in countries like China, Taiwan and Japan. The teaching is masked by the arts and crafts activity, and review is often in the form of a game or additional activity.