Students learn English best when they are engaged and having fun. Insights to English projects range from short-term to year-long and include topic-based projects, webquests, writing prompts, and more. There’s a variety of individual, pair, small group, and class-wide projects available.
Writing essays isn’t always fun, but with many learners (especially kids and teenagers) watching lots of YouTube videos these days, chances are they watch plenty of video essays. For this project, they’ll deconstruct a few to see how essays can be done in a more interesting way.
Students create fun, challenging, and silly patches or merit badges, inspired by the ones that Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts might earn through their accomplishments.
Students write their own mini-dictionary (or an excerpt of one) based on a fictional property they enjoy, providing definitions to made-up words.
Throughout the year (or semester), students take turns writing headlines for something that happened on that day, but for any year in the past. These headlines are displayed on the classroom wall.
Students will write a description of the same place multiple times. Each time, they’ll do so from a new perspective, one that requires them to think about and focus on different things, and even the tone of the description should be a little different each time.
Different people can look up at the clouds or at the stars and see different things from the person standing next to them. In this project, students will have to defend what shapes they see by identifying its features.
Here’s a great way to practice idioms and other sayings by changing a detail or two to fit a new context. Students get to deliver jokes by substituting one of the words from that expression with another word similar in either sound or meaning.
Students get to practice Future Forms and Adverbs (word, phrases, and clauses) as they set their New Year’s Resolutions.
This project is for practicing INDIRECT QUESTIONS. Students will act as investigators asking witnesses for information. But some witnesses will only respond to Direct Questions, some only to Indirect Questions, and some only to Commands.
This project is for practicing RELATIVE CLAUSES. Students learn about disabilities/disorders and about the people who have them. As we discuss them it’s often appropriate to have the modifier after the person, which can be done with Relative Clauses.
This project is for practicing ACTIVE & PASSIVE ADJECTIVES. Students learn about and compare different natural disasters, including what causes them and the effect they have on the world. This project is mostly done as a giant class discussion.
This project is for practicing GERUNDS. Students design and participate in silly activities in the style of the Olympics.
This project is for practicing WISHES & REGRETS. Students create a scenario in which a wish comes true! But the main character is never satisfied an wishes for more. Only the students can decide if the character eventually learns to be content.
This project is for practicing QUESTION TAGS. Students play The Newlywed Game – except as friends – and instead of stating what they believe to be true, they’ll put it in the form of a question.
This project is for practicing GERUNDS. Students design and participate in silly activities in the style of the Olympics.
This project is for practicing ADVERBIAL CLAUSES. Students engage in a webquest to learn more about an activism event or campaign, building awareness of social, environmental, or economical causes while practicing grammar!
This project is for practicing PROGRESSIVE/CONTINUOUS TENSES. Students will first conjure a backstory to a fairy tale character and lay out a scene, then investigate the scenes that other teams have put together to determine what was going on.
This project is for practicing REPORTED SPEECH. Teams design a scenario, a setting, and a quote. Then other teams are challenged with reporting it in other settings/scenarios. See how many they can do in under a minute.
These articles contain ideas to get you started! We encourage teachers to further customize these projects to best suit their learners’ level, interests, and needs.
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