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.
Students can create characters that they’ll use throughout the year. Each month, the character progresses a little closer to their goal, but in the meantime, they can be used to answer questions and for other activities. The possibilities are wide open.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Indeed, there is so much one can say about any given image. So let’s see just how much we can say about one picture: students need to describe, analyze, and speculate on everything they see in the image.
A common adage among writers is “show, don’t tell”. Writing in this way prompts students to think of different ways to express the same thing. Students will have to use expressions and imagery – like native speakers do in most situations – instead of being straightforward.
Colors are often used to represent various concepts and to evoke certain moods. In design, colors are chosen carefully. In this WebQuest, each student will chose one color and research what it tends to signify, find examples of its usage, and craft their own assessments.
Have your students compile all the nouns and adjectives they’ve learned over the past year, then put each on its own card. Play a customized Apples-to-Apples game tailored to your own class’s knowledge, skill level, culture, and interests.
Make your students form an argument as to why something is better than the alternative. As essay-writing practice, here are twenty topics. Students should choose which of a pair to support, and their arguments could be subjective, objective, or both.
Students create their own towns! They need to consider where the town is, what it’s known for, how big the town is, and more. They’ll need to figure out how many of each type of building to include. Students reason with their group-mates and come to decisions.
Writing for a school newspaper on a monthly basis can encourage students to write about things they’re interested in, can foster collaboration, and can help students practice writing in different styles.
Whether you’re doing a fun exercise of flash fiction or you’re practicing a particular language topic, sometimes your students need a little push to get started. Here are ten first sentences of potential stories.
Zodiacs incorporate a lot of different elements and group the specifics together in interesting ways. Getting your students to design their own zodiac allows you to review multiple topics. It also requires reasoning and encourages creativity.
Nowadays, music is ubiquitous, as are the devices that play them. Most people just play music off their computers or phones. Many kids in school don’t even know what CDs are, not to mention vinyl.
Suppose there’s a new film coming out soon that many of your students are excited about. You can take that opportunity to give them some assignments they’ll enjoy. Different assignments will require different skills as we work both before and after the film’s release.
November is National Novel Writing Month, but your students don’t have to write a whole novel to challenge themselves and practice creative English. Encourage them to write 5,000 words instead. A short story in a month is still something to celebrate!
Encourage your students to think of some inventions, giving them a project to pour their creativity into. Different tasks throughout the project focus on different aspects of English, so this project can be used as a practical example for introducing new topics, or it might be a good review.
Vampires have been all the rage in fiction for the past couple decades. As different authors and film-makers have made their own stories, many have made changes to the classic lore. Let’s compare and contrast vampires from different stories.
A great way to engage students is to create projects within contexts and formats that they are already using in their personal lives. One of my favorite ways of doing this is through blogs.
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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