Sometimes, all we need is an engaging activity to get our students using English. There are loads of activities that require little or no preparation. All we need is some careful planning or from time to time, the willingness to go with the flow and use what we have up our sleeves.

Here are 10 fun and easy activities that you can use in an EFL or ESL class. Most of them can be adapted to different levels, topics, and age groups, so you can easily make them work for your own classroom.

1. Categories

Divide the class into two teams.

Explain the rules. You will give the students a category.

Call two students from each team to the board.

Set a timer for two minutes and tell them to write as many words as they can think of related to the category.

Some categories could be:

• Things in a fridge

• Things you can buy from a supermarket

• Expensive items

• Things you can find in a living room

• Adjectives that describe personality

2. Right Word, Wrong Place

Prepare a handout with newly learned structures or some quotes related to the topic you would like to discuss in class.

Make grammatically incorrect sentences by changing the position of two words in each sentence, and ask students to correct them.

For example:

She goes always to school by bus.

Students have to find the words that are in the wrong places and correct the sentence.

3. Catch the Words

Draw a circle and write some letters inside it. Students have to use these letters to form words.

Prepare a handout with the words you have recently studied in class, but jumble the letters in each word.

Students have to “catch” the correct words by putting the letters together.

You can turn this into a competition by putting students into teams and giving them a time limit.

4. Dialogues

Write sentences on slips of paper, or ask students to write some sentences themselves.

Put the students in pairs.

Give each pair four slips of paper, preferably with the same four sentences, and tell them to write a dialogue.

Their task is to insert the sentences on the slips of paper naturally into their dialogue.

When they are ready, ask the pairs to perform their dialogues for the class.

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5. Comprehension Questions

Write the topic of the reading passage or listening activity on the board.

Tell students to copy the topic on a piece of paper and write a question about it.

Then, ask them to pass their paper to a classmate. The classmate writes another question and passes the paper to the next student.

Continue until the papers have gone around the class.

When students receive their original papers back, ask them to read the text or listen to the recording and find out whether any of the questions are answered.

You can then discuss the questions as a class.

6. Find Your People

Give each student a piece of paper and ask them to write at least five features that describe their personality.

Collect the papers from the students.

Then, put four chairs in a plus (+) shape.

Read the features written on the papers aloud. Students who have the features you mention should gather around the same chair.

Once they are in groups, ask students to talk about their similarities.

You can also ask them to create a class poster about their group.

This activity would be a great first-week activity, especially with large classes, as it gives students an opportunity to find things they have in common with their classmates.

7. Dice Questions

Level: Any
Materials: A pair of dice

Elicit six topics you have studied, such as:

1. Family

2. School

3. Food

4. Music

5. Books

6. Inventions

Then, elicit six question words:

1. What

2. Where

3. When

4. Why

5. Who

6. How

Put students into two teams. Tell them that if their team can form a correct question, they will get two points.

Throw the two dice.

Students should ask a question based on the numbers on the dice.

For example, if the dice show 2 and 4, the student chooses topic number 2 (school) and question word number 4 (why).

The student could ask:

Why do you like your school?

You can make the activity more challenging by asking students to answer the questions as well.

8. Intonation Fun

This activity is a fun way to highlight the importance of intonation.

Play some music and tell students to walk around the classroom. When you stop the music, give them an instruction.

Ask them to say the words in quotation marks in the context that follows.

“Hello”

• To a friend

• To a friend you haven’t seen for three years

• To a neighbour you don’t like

• To a six-year-old child

• To someone you have just caught doing something they shouldn’t

• To someone on the phone when you are not sure if they are still on the other end

Give students similar situations for:

“Goodbye”

“How are you?”

“What have you done?”

Afterwards, discuss how their voice, stress, and intonation changed depending on the situation.

9. 5-Word Sentences

Ask students to write sentences using the following rules:

1. Each sentence must have at least five words.

2. Each word in the sentence must begin with the same letter given by the teacher.

3. Students may use a proper name, but only once in a sentence.

4. The winner is the student who can write a grammatically correct sentence.

For example, if the letter is S:

Some students sometimes speak slowly.

10. Swapping Questions

Give students strips of paper or Post-it notes.

Choose a topic and ask students to write a question related to it on their piece of paper.

Tell students to stand up and move around the classroom, asking their questions to different classmates.

When two students have asked each other their questions, they swap questions and move on to find a new partner.

Then they ask their new partner the new question and swap again.

Set a time limit if you like.

You can also use music with this activity. Tell students to walk around while the music is playing. When you stop the music, they find a partner, ask their questions, and swap papers. Start the music again and repeat.

This works well when you want students to practise the same language several times without repeating the same conversation with one partner.

A Little Fun Can Go a Long Way

None of these activities require long preparation or extra materials. A board, some paper, a few slips of paper, or even a pair of dice can be enough to turn a regular lesson into something more interactive.

The important thing is not the game itself, but what students do with the language while they are playing: they recall vocabulary, form questions, speak to different classmates, and use language in a more natural way.

These activities may save you time and energy in the new academic year.

I've been blogging my teaching journey for 18 years now, and these activities were all published on my blog at some point along the way. I just pulled out 10 of my favorites and made a collage.

This summer, I couldn’t take a holiday. Family stuff got in the way, so instead of going on holiday, I stayed in the city and worked at summer school for most of it. But I wrote more than I have in a long time.

Writing helped me a lot.
I reflected on a lot of things.
I researched and learned a lot of things.

I played with AI tools and now I’m about to finalize my workshop for the training day at university. The posts I wrote played a central part in the content of the workshop. I really enjoyed preparing it.

When I moved my blog to WordPress and rediscovered Substack, I decided to write more again as I used to do in the past.

I wasn’t sure what to write about at first. That took a few weeks to decide. Once I did, Substack became the thing I looked forward to, not because of the writing itself, but because of who it connected me with. Educators and writers that I really enjoyed reading.

Some weeks I posted more than once. Other weeks, nothing. But looking back now, I like what came out of it. Here’s what I’d point you to if you missed it:

• We Teach Grammar. We Forget to Teach Talking.

• Communication in Class

• If Franklin, Provost and Le Guin Walk Into My Writing Class ...

• The AI Laziness Trap We Shouldn’t Fall Into

• Tiny Stories for the Beginner EFL Classrooms

• Fifteen Years of Ideas for Class Readers, All in One Place

• 5 Interaction Patterns to Wake Up Your Grammar Lessons

• Can AI Feel What You Feel?

• Teaching AI Literacy: Can AI Feel What You Feel? Part 2

And one from the blog: I wrote 10 Practical Teacher Wellbeing Tips That Still Work After 30 Years. It felt right to write about looking after yourself, for once, instead of your students.

So how was your summer?

The new academic year is about to start, and teachers all around the world are getting ready for their new classes. Beginning a new term is often very challenging, both for the teacher and the students. On the other hand, the first week can be a great opportunity for a more productive year.

Every year, when I start with a new class, instead of doing traditional getting-to-know-you activities, I try to give my students a perspective that will help them consider their goals and motivate them to study for the whole year.

Today I want to share a few ideas that make room for critical thinking, sets the mood of the class, and helps you build rapport with your students.

1. My English Road Map

Give each student an A4-size paper and ask them to draw their English learning journey as a road, river, or timeline. Tell them to mark the moments (a moment they felt proud, a moment they achieved something, a moment they realised something, a bad experience, somewhere they got stuck, something that made them want to quit). They don’t have to write full sentences.

Then pair students and ask them to swap maps and interview each other about each other’s maps.

In the last phase of the activity, put students in groups and ask each student to introduce their partner’s map to the group.

Optional follow-up: You may want to take the activity one step further and ask them to write a one-line prediction. “Where do you think this road goes this year?” Tell them to write their sentences on a piece of paper, add their name, and put them in a box. Don’t forget to revisit the box in June.

2. My Booklet

Give students the following prompt:
Your teacher wants to know you better. Create a booklet to introduce yourself.

Write the followings on the board to help them create the booklet:

• Best way to get my attention

• Something that makes me want to participate

• Something that makes me stop learning

• When I don’t understand, I usually…

• One thing I would like my teacher to know this year

• My hobbies and interests …

3. What Would You Keep?

Put 10–12 classroom objects/ideas on the board:
homework, tests, group work, presentations, games, notebooks, A, mistakes, competition, projects, grades

Tell students that they are redesigning school and they can keep only five.

In groups, they have to choose five of them and justify their choice.

In the next step of the activity, tell them the school has lost half its budget and they can keep only three.

In the last turn ask them: Which one would they keep and why? Then ask each group to explain how they arrived at their final point.

4. The Class We Haven’t Built Yet

Put students into groups and give them the following prompt:
You have been given one classroom and one school year. There are no existing rules. You and your classmates have to design the class from scratch.

Decide:

• What should students be allowed to do?

• What shouldn’t students be allowed to do?

• What should students be responsible for?

• How should mistakes be treated?

• How should students participate?

• Should there be homework? What kind?

• How should the teacher know whether students are learning?

• What should happen when someone doesn’t participate?

• What makes a classroom a good place to learn?

At this stage, I prefer to ask students to explain why they have chosen each rule rather than agreeing on something because everyone likes it. At the end, each group presents its five rules.

I’d also like to hear what you are planning for your first week in September.

Our learners learn English to speak. Their main goal is actually to be able to speak. They need to speak English when they study, work or travel. Some of them choose to study English because they want to, while others need to learn the language for other reasons. Whatever the reason is for them to be in our classes, they usually are not comfortable when it is time to speak. Besides their fear of speaking, we also don’t do much to help them in class. If they are not in a multicultural class, they don’t have a chance to speak English outside the classroom before they step into real English-speaking contexts. So I believe we should help them more with speaking.

Here are a few ideas to give enough space for speaking practice:

1. Shadowing

Nowadays, I’m reading a lot about shadowing and I just wrote an article on my blog and shared a post on Instagram too. Basically, it’s a technique to help students become more fluent. It’s not for comprehension, it’s mainly about fluency. You can advise your students to try the technique: choose recordings and assign them to practise their English along with these recordings. Again, the aim is not comprehension, but the flow of the language, which is why it’s especially useful for students getting ready for exams.

2. Devote more time to speaking

Not only a speaking lesson, but a whole grammar, listening, writing or reading lesson can turn into a speaking practice. From warmers to follow-up tasks, we can create more speaking activities to encourage our students to speak.

3. Planning time, to make speaking less intimidating

One reason students don’t speak in lessons is that they can’t find anything to say when the question is directed to them. So, we can give our students time to prepare before they speak. We can set the task, set a time limit for preparation, and then ask them to speak.

4. A relaxed atmosphere is a must

Another reason is that they are afraid of making mistakes, because in most classes making mistakes isn’t tolerated. However, the language classroom is an exception. From the first lesson on, tell them their mistakes are accepted and treated well.

5. Model the structure

Set the task and provide the necessary structures so that they feel ready to speak. Model it yourself so that they feel ready to produce.

6. Variety of interaction patterns

Create tasks where students will first think and build individually, then share with their friend, compare, and then continue their conversation in groups.

7. Teach strategy

Actually, I am not keen on giving formulas to students. But when we’re preparing them for exams, we give them certain strategies to make them better speakers. So we can teach them how to develop their ideas when they are discussing something. We can mention that they should give the point, the main idea, then explain it, give examples, and then a result, maybe.

None of this is complicated. It's mostly about remembering that speaking needs its own space, not just the leftover minutes at the end of a lesson.

Well, We all know that if a kid doesn’t like the teacher, he stops learning or if a kid trusts his teacher, he starts to do something for the lesson. Parents also know that sometimes their kids misbehave because they think their parents ignore them. So every act in a class or at home can be a hint for the teacher or the parent to evaluate themselves and change certain things.

Rapport is defined as ‘a good understanding of someone and an ability to communicate well with them’ (Cambridge Dictionary online). Communication is a mutual thing. If we move one step further, the other person will need to move too. If we move 2 steps further, he will at least move one step towards us.

As a teacher or a parent, we should find ways to build rapport or establish good communication with the kids.

This shouldn’t mean getting approval or being liked or becoming the most popular teacher in the school. You can be cool, trendy but the relationship between you and your students can be so artificial. A good relationship between you and your students can be the result of certain things which were done to gain confidence. If the student understands the teacher cares for him, he surely will try to change himself.

How to establish good relationship with your students:

First impressions are important. Even at a workshop, seminar or a performance, we always remember the beginning and the ending. Thus, from the first day you meet your students everything you do counts.

We can keep the following in mind before we prepare ourselves for our classes:

• Explain yourself. Let them know they will have limits- if they know your rules, they will play the game according to the rules.

• Encourage your students. Motivate and support them when needed.

• Praise them -even we need praise and we feel unhappy when we don’t get it.

• Be prepared and well-planned (they see the difference very well)

• Be enthusiastic about teaching- enthusiasm is infectious,

• Respect them, listen to them- if they understand you regard them as a human-being, they will feel they are also important.

• Make eye-contact and learn their names from the very first day of the class.

• Bring the world to the classroom.

None of this is a formula. Some days I get all of it right and the class still feels flat. Some days I forget half of it and something still clicks anyway. But over thirty years, this much has stayed true: when students feel seen, they try harder.

I’m not a teacher, only a fellow traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead, ahead of myself as well as you.
— George Bernard Shaw

I love reading a lot and I love creative writing activities. I love playing with writing and I believe one of the things that help students improve their English is writing. Over the years I’ve tried to motivate my students to write better using different techniques and activities. Here are a few of them:

The Benjamin Franklin Method:

Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write by studying essays. His method was very simple: He would read an essay closely, then jot down just the key points. A few days later, he’d try to reconstruct the whole essay from his notes. Then he would compare his version with the original, trying to understand what he did well, what he missed. I’ve adapted this into a three-session classroom sequence that I now use when teaching essays with my students:

Session 1: Present the model text (a body paragraph, or a full essay depending on level). Go through it together, highlighting the structure: topic sentences, connectors, thesis statements, whatever the text is built from. Discuss purpose and tone. Tell students to take notes.

Session 2: Briefly review the keywords or structure from the previous class, then do short drills on the connectors, phrases, or paragraph components they’ll need. This is also good to review for grammar or vocabulary.

Session 3: Tell students to rebuild the original text from memory, using only their keyword notes. Once they finish, ask them to compare their version with the original one, underlining what’s missing, highlighting what they did well, and reflecting on organisation and word choice.

Session 4: At this stage, they are ready to write their own essay on a similar topic.

We become better if we read and write more and in the exercise above, the students read carefully a better model, before moving to their essays and once they are given the task, they feel more confident to start. This activity serves well as a drill for writing classes.

The Gary Provost “Write Music” Exercise

Gary Provost describes how to form a better paragraph and explains as follows:

We can use what he said in our classes. I’m listening to him and stealing from him. In the classroom, give students a paragraph consisted of 5-word sentences and have them read it. Ask what they noticed. Then show them a second version of the same paragraph written with longer and shorter sentences. Ask them to read that too, and ask them to compare the paragraphs.

Once a student has noticed the difference, the importance of sentence variety becomes more comprehensible. We can also give them 5-word-sentence paragraphs and ask them to improve. Here is a sample exercise:

Save this paragraph. Find its rhythm by adding adjectives, adverbs and clauses.

Travelling teaches us many things. We meet people from everywhere. New cultures open our minds. We try new local food. Languages become easier to understand. Travelling also reduces daily stress. We see beautiful places worldwide. Every trip creates lasting memories.

Here is the improved version:

Travelling teaches us many valuable things. We meet friendly people who come from different countries. New cultures really open our minds. We try new and tasty local food that we never tasted before. Foreign languages slowly become easier to understand when we practise every day. Travelling also reduces our daily stress a lot. We see truly beautiful places worldwide that we always remember. Every trip creates special lasting memories.

Are Short Sentences Always Bad? Taking Le Guin to the EFL Class:

Ursula K. Le Guin has a similar exercise in Steering the Craft. She asks writers to rewrite a piece using only short sentences, then rewrite the same piece using only long ones. This exercise also helps students notice the rhythm of the sentences. Here is an exercise you can try with students:

Give them this short paragraph:

The rain started. It was cold. She didn’t have an umbrella. She waited under a tree. The bus was late.

Ask them to rewrite it in one long sentence, joining the ideas with connectors.

Although she had left the house early that morning, hoping to avoid the crowds, she found herself standing at the bus stop for almost an hour, watching the rain fall harder every minute.

Read both versions aloud. Ask students: How did each one sound? Encourage them to compare and choose the one they liked and ask why they liked it.

Actually I like how the short sentences make me feel about a story. Contrary to common belief, short sentences are not always boring. In fact, when used well, they become very powerful. My daughter writes short stories almost entirely in short sentences, and they do not feel boring or weak at all, they feel fast, urgent, like the story is happening right now. Short sentences can build tension and speed up a scene.

I used to run creative writing workshops with teens and adults and I love playing with the language. I think every writer has their style and these styles make us read what they write. I have a tangled mind and sometimes I use longer sentences and then write short ones. I don’t like periods, I love ellipses… and well, what about your style?

And what do you think about these? Do you have any writing activities to add to my list?

I use AI almost every day.

I use it to brainstorm lesson ideas, create discussion questions, generate texts, improve worksheets, and sometimes simply to help me think through a problem. It has become one of the most useful tools in my teaching toolkit.

But there is something I’ve been noticing lately.

The more helpful AI becomes, the easier it is to stop doing some of the thinking ourselves.

That’s not a criticism of AI. It’s a reminder that every powerful tool changes our habits.

AI can make teachers less creative if we let it do everything.

Here we face that popular question again: Will AI replace the teachers? I think we are looking from the wrong side of the window most of the time. The danger isn’t that AI will replace teachers. The danger is that teachers might gradually stop exercising the very skills that make great teaching possible.

Creativity Is Like a Muscle.

One reason many teachers feel exhausted is that teaching requires constant preparation.

We adapt activities on the spot. We simplify explanations. We find examples that connect with our learners. We redesign lessons when something doesn’t work.

These decisions happen hundreds of times every week.

Creativity isn’t a talent that some people have and others don’t. It’s a skill developed through regular use.

If every lesson idea comes from AI, every worksheet is generated by AI, and every problem is solved by AI, we may save time in the short term but lose something valuable in the long term.

Just as muscles weaken when they aren’t used, creative thinking becomes slower when we stop practising it.

We should learn to use AI as a thinking partner, not a thinking replacement

The most productive way to use AI is not to ask it to do the work for us. Instead, ask it to work with us. When I have a lesson idea, I often start with my own rough plan before opening AI. Sometimes it’s only a few notes jotted down in a notebook. Sometimes it’s a half-formed activity that needs improvement. Only after I’ve done some thinking do I ask AI for suggestions.

This small habit makes a big difference.

Instead of becoming dependent on the tool, I remain the designer and decision-maker. I stay in the driver’s seat.

Keep Creating Things from Scratch

Not every task needs AI. Sometimes it’s worth creating an activity completely on your own.

• Write your own discussion questions.

• Design your own speaking task.

• Create your own examples.

• Adapt a lesson based on something that happened in class that morning.

These moments keep your creative muscles active.

Think of it as the teaching assistant you have never had. Not something that would lead you to become dependent on a tool.

• Question AI’s Ideas

One of the easiest traps to fall into is assuming that because AI sounds confident, its suggestions must be good. They aren’t always…

AI often produces activities that look impressive but lack clear learning outcomes. Sometimes the ideas are repetitive. Sometimes they’re generic. Sometimes they’re simply unsuitable for a particular group of learners.

A useful habit is to treat AI outputs the way you would treat suggestions from a colleague.

• Listen.

• Consider.

• Adapt.

• Improve.

• Reject if necessary.

Professional judgment still matters. Perhaps more than ever.

We actually know very well that many creative teaching ideas don’t come from textbooks, or AI tools.

• They come from life.

• From books.

• From conversations.

• From hobbies.

• From films, podcasts, travel, music, and random observations.

If AI becomes our only source of inspiration, our teaching can start to feel strangely similar to everyone else’s.

The most memorable lessons often come from the unique experiences and interests that teachers bring into the classroom. We should try to protect those sources of inspiration. more than ever. They’re irreplaceable.

Students do not need teachers who can generate worksheets in three seconds.

Students need teachers who can notice confusion, build relationships, encourage risk-taking, inspire curiosity, and create meaningful learning experiences.

These are deeply human skills that AI will hardly replace.

AI can support them. It cannot replace them.

A Final Thought

I don’t think the future belongs to teachers who avoid AI.

Nor do I think it belongs to teachers who hand everything over to AI.

The future belongs to teachers who learn to use AI sensibly while continuing to think, question, create, and grow.

After all, the most powerful educational technology in any classroom is still the teacher’s mind.

If you want a more practical breakdown of what this looks like in the classroom, I wrote about it here: 4 Ways to Avoid Lazy AI Lesson Planning

You don’t need to know anything about coding. If you use Claude, you can make your students think “wow, my teacher is cool.”

Explain clearly what you want. Give Claude the CEFR level, the age and size of your class, and your objective, then ask it to create a game you can play together in class. That’s it. No plugins, no templates, no hours lost searching for “the perfect worksheet” online.

For my B1 tense revision, I asked for something interactive, something that would make students hunt for the mistake instead of just filling a gap. What came back was a small detective game. Every sentence has one verb hiding in the wrong tense, and students have to click on the word they think is wrong. When they find it, Claude explains why, in plain language, right there on the screen.

Unlike Kahoot or Quizizz, you can’t see the results or announce a winner automatically. But you can still bring the competition into the room. Here’s how.

Set it up

Divide the class into two groups and ask them to stand in two rows facing the board. Invite one student from each row at a time to come up and choose the word they think is wrong.

Add some challenge

A few ways to raise the stakes, once your students get the hang of the basic game:

• Time pressure. Give the student at the board ten seconds to decide. Count out loud or use your phone. If time runs out, the turn passes to the other team.

• The silent team rule. While a student is at the board, the rest of the team can’t call out the answer. They can whisper help, or not help at all, your call. This keeps the thinking on the student in front of the class, not the loudest voice behind them.

• Explain to earn the point. A correct click alone gets one point. If the student can also explain why that tense is wrong, in their own words, the team earns a bonus point. This turns clicking into understanding.

• Double or nothing. Before a case that usually trips students up (past perfect and future forms are the usual suspects), a team can choose to gamble. Right answer, two points. Wrong answer, zero. It’s optional, and it’s always their call.

None of this needs an app, a login, or a subscription. It needs a prompt.

Here are the screenshots from the game:

What to tell Claude

If you want to build your own version for a different level or topic, here’s roughly what I gave it:

• The CEFR level and age of my students

• The exact grammar point (in my case, a full review of B1 tenses)

• That I wanted students to find the mistake, not just choose from options

• That I wanted a short explanation to appear after each correct answer

• That it needed to work on a smart board, in front of the whole class

Claude did the rest. You don’t need to know what HTML or JavaScript mean. You just need to know your students, and what you want them to walk away understanding.

PS: The prompt is here.

Option 1: Let Claude write the statements

“I teach a B1-level class of [class size] teenagers. I want a short, interactive game to review all the main tenses (present simple, present continuous, present perfect simple and continuous, past simple, past continuous, past perfect, and future forms). Instead of multiple choice, I want students to find the mistake themselves by clicking on the wrong word in each sentence. Write the sentences yourself. After a correct click, show a short explanation of why that tense was wrong. It needs to work well on a smart board in front of the whole class. Please build it as a single HTML file.”

Option 2: Use your own statements

“I teach a B1-level class of [class size] teenagers. Below are sentences I wrote myself, each with one verb in the wrong tense. Turn these into a short, interactive game where students find the mistake by clicking on the wrong word. After a correct click, show a short explanation of why that tense was wrong. It needs to work well on a smart board in front of the whole class. Please build it as a single HTML file.

[paste your sentences here, one per line]”

Copy whichever fits you, change the details to match your class, and see what Claude gives you back.

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I wrote a longer piece on the blog this week about something I’ve been using in my A1-A2 classes: tiny stories. Three or four sentences, a small shift in the middle, and two or three questions that let students expand it into something bigger.

You can read the full post here: https://evasimkesyan.com/tiny-stories/

Here I want to share two ready-to-use stories, one A1 and one A2, with expanding questions you can take straight into class.

Story 1 (A1)

Yesterday she missed her train. At first she was angry. Then she found a lovely café near the station

Expanding questions:

1. What did she have in the café?

2. How did she feel?

3. Who did she meet there, if anyone?

4. What did she do after the café?

5. Did she still catch a train that day?

Story 2 (A2)

Last week my phone stopped working. I was really worried because all my photos were on it.

Expanding questions:

1. What did she do first?

2. Who did she ask for help?

3. Where did she take the phone?

4. How long did it take to fix?

5. How did she feel when it was fixed?

And if you’d like more ready-made material, my Free Lesson Plans page has over a dozen more, sorted by category: https://evasimkesyan.com/free-lesson-plans-for-the-elt-classroom/

A fuller set of tiny stories, sorted by level, is right below in a free booklet, print it, save it, or scroll through it with your next class.

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Tiny Stories A1 A2 Booklet

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A few years ago, when I was in the middle of a very long and very slow recovery, I went to a Hockney exhibition, and it did something I didn’t expect: it gave me back a bit of hope I thought I’d lost. I sat and watched a documentary playing in the exhibition hall, and heard him say, "do remember they can't cancel the spring," and I remember standing there, repeating it to myself, feeling something wake up in me. One man, one exhibition, on a rainy day, did more for me than any treatment had. It reminded me that things happen, and we move on. It aches, and then it fades. Not forever, but it fades.

Ever since I heard the news of his death, I’ve been thinking about planning a lesson around one of his paintings.

I chose one of Hockney’s iPad drawings from The Arrival of Spring. You can use the lesson for any of the paintings in this series.

A little context to share with students, briefly: around 2011, Hockney started drawing on an iPad, sitting outdoors along a country lane called Woldgate and recording the same view repeatedly as winter turned into spring. This particular drawing shows one tree in full, bright leaf, surrounded by a still-grey sky and a landscape only just catching up to it.

Stage 1: Warmer

Before showing the image, get students talking in pairs about seasons in general:

• Which season do you look forward to most, and why?

• Describe one small sign that tells you a new season has arrived where you live.

• Has there ever been a period in your life that felt like “winter,” followed by something better?

Stage 2: Lead-in

Show the image and give students about a minute of quiet looking before anyone speaks. Then open it up with some noticing questions:

• What’s the first thing your eye goes to in this picture?

• How would you describe the sky? Does it match the tree, or contrast with it?

• What season do you think this is? What tells you that?

• If this picture made a sound, what would it be?

Once you’ve heard a few answers, give the context: an iPad drawing, made by Hockney outdoors, part of a series following one road through an entire spring.

Stage 3: Building a Word Bank

Ask students to look again and jot down words and phrases under these headings, working alone first and then comparing with a partner:

• Colour and light: the greens, yellows, and greys, and how they sit next to each other.

• Nature vocabulary: they can use a dictionary to name anything they spot.

• Mood or atmosphere: hopeful, calm, a little uncertain, somewhere in between.

• Contrast: what two things in the picture feel most different from one another?

After a few minutes of pair work, collect ideas on the board. On the board, introduce models:

• the tree is bursting into leaf

• the sky still looks quite heavy

• the foreground is scattered with fallen petals

Stage 4: Group Discussion — Reading the Weather

Put students in small groups and give them 5 minutes to discuss the following, using the vocabulary from the board:

• Do you think this is early spring or late spring? What in the picture makes you think so?

• If the (grey) sky represents something (difficult), and the tree represents something (hopeful), what might this picture be “about”?

• Have you ever noticed nature changing around you in a way that matched how you were feeling?

When groups share back, encourage the rest of the class to ask one follow-up question to each other, and remind everyone to use some speculative language while answering these questions. Before they start, write the following on the board to serve as models:

• it might represent... / perhaps the artist wanted... / it could suggest that...

Stage 5: Writing

Students choose one option and write 60–90 words:

• Option A (Descriptive): Describe the picture using vocabulary from the board — the colours, the season, and the mood it creates.

• Option B (Creative): Imagine you’re standing under this tree. Write a short paragraph about what you can see, hear, and feel.

• Option C (Grammar focus): Write a short paragraph comparing what the landscape looked like a few weeks earlier and how it looks now, using at least one sentence with the Present Perfect (e.g., “The tree has completely changed since...”).

Keep a few sentence starters visible for anyone who wants the support:

• In this picture, the sky looks...

• The tree is covered in...

• The overall feeling is... because...

Once the writing’s done, have students swap with a partner and underline one phrase they genuinely liked. No corrections at this stage, just a bit of positive noticing.

This also works well on Padlet if you want students to read a few classmates’ paragraphs and leave one comment before the lesson ends.

Stage 6: Speaking

New pairs, and a new set of questions to close the speaking:

• Do you agree that nature can reflect how we feel, or is that too simple?

• If you drew the same view near your home once a week for a year, what do you think would change the most?

Stage 7: Wrap-up

Hand out post-it notes and ask students to complete one of the following before they leave, adding it to your reflection wall (physical or on Padlet):

• One new word or phrase from today they want to keep.

• One sentence describing the picture using a word from the board.

• One small sign of a “new season” in their own life at the moment, if they’re comfortable sharing it.

If you liked this lesson, you may check one of my older posts: https://ajourneyintefl.substack.com/p/one-painting-one-lesson

I went digging through my own archives last week, back to some of the very first activities I ever posted about class readers, some from over fifteen years ago, and I ended up somewhere I didn’t expect: thinking about how I became a reader myself.

I did the narrow reading thing before I even knew it had a name. There was a time in my childhood when I only read Enid Blyton. Then came the French classics, then the Russians. I fell hopelessly in love with Sartre and Camus and their contemporaries. Later it was the Italians, then the South Americans, then at university it was time to read British novelists. There was even a phase when I read nothing but poetry, Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, Zahrad.

I was lucky enough to have two primary school teachers who led me down the paths of my reading journey. I still think about these two ladies when I plan a reading lesson, because I believe teachers can shape whether a student becomes a reader or not. That belief is exactly why I’ve spent years collecting, testing, and hoarding fun activities to pair with class readers, novels, and short stories.

So here they all are, gathered in one place for the first time: the ones that have survived over fifteen years of trying things out with real classes.

Games That Turn Comprehension Into Competition

Tic-tac-toe with a twist. Write comprehension or discussion questions on numbered slips, one for each square of a tic-tac-toe grid (prepare two or three versions of each question in case a team gets it wrong). Split the class into Xs and Os, let them pick a number, and if they answer correctly, they claim the square.

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire. The classic game show format, just rebuilt entirely from questions about the book you’re reading together.

Who Said That? Pull quotes or lines straight from the novel, split the class into two teams, and simply ask: who said that? It’s a wonderful way to get students paying closer attention to voice and characterisation as they read.

Snowball fights. Have students write a question or a quote from the story on a piece of paper, crumple it into a “snowball,” and let them have a proper (short!) snowball fight. When you call time, everyone grabs the nearest snowball and answers what’s inside.

Writing Activities That Don’t Feel Like Writing Tasks

Mini sagas. Give groups a word cloud poster from the story’s vocabulary and ask them to choose five words to write a mini saga with them.

Six-word stories. Cut a few illustrations out of the book, or generate a specific scene with AI, give each pair a different image, and challenge them to tell its story in exactly six words.

Letters to the writer, or to a character. Ask students to write to the author, telling them what the class did with the book and how they reacted to it, or have them write directly to a character with questions or suggestions.

“What happened before the story started.” A brilliant prompt I picked up from Robert Hill’s session on readers at an IATEFL Black Cat Publishing workshop. Students invent the backstory the book never tells them.

Adapting the story to today. Ask students to move the plot to the year they’re currently living in and write a summary of how it changes. A great way to get them thinking about how context shapes a story. My students wrote beautiful stories on Joyce’s “Eveline,” for example.

The “10 Things Before I Die” List. Have students analyse a character and write a bucket list from that character’s perspective. The challenge? They have to persuade you and their classmates why the character would want to do those things.

Travel brochure guides. If the story is set somewhere distinct, a real city or a fantasy world, students organise a fictional trip there. They build an itinerary, recommend local food (even invented food, if it’s a fantasy setting), and put together a packing list. It’s a lovely way to get them thinking carefully about setting and detail, the kind of thing they’d otherwise skim past.

Visual and Multimedia Projects

Word clouds and mini dictionaries. Students collect the most interesting new words, phrases, and expressions from the book and turn them into a word cloud, a mini glossary, or even a short slide deck.

New book covers. Have them redesign the cover and write their own blurb for it.

Timelines. Whether hand-drawn or built with an online tool, mapping out the story’s events helps students see structure they might otherwise miss.

The novel soundtrack. Ask students to find a song that matches the mood of each chapter (or five songs for the whole book). It always sparks more debate than you’d expect.

Movie trailers. In groups, students storyboard or film a trailer for the “movie” of the book.

Speaking and Performance

Interview with the author. Students prepare and record (or animate) an interview with the writer.

Script and act it out. Assign a chapter, have pairs or groups write the script, then perform it, on video if you like. If several groups tackle the same chapter, you can vote on the best adaptation, best line delivery, best soundtrack, and so on.

Radio play. Turn each chapter into an audio recording instead of a live performance, a lovely alternative to simple reading aloud.

Character talk show. Students prepare a talk-show format and interview one or more characters from the book.

Book talk for another class. Students organise a short event to introduce the book to a different class, complete with a poster, without giving away the ending.

The Ultimate Feedback

At the end of a reading workshop, I love asking students for a quick reflection: 3 things they loved, 2 things they learned, and 1 feeling they are leaving with.

Reading shouldn’t feel like a chore or a passive exercise. When we give students permission to play, text stops being just ink on a page and becomes a living, breathing world.

This is very much a living list, and over to you now: how do you keep reading active and joyful in your own classroom? If you’ve got another activity that’s earned its place in your regular rotation, I’d genuinely love to hear it in the comments.

This post pulls together and reworks ideas from several posts in the blog archive. If you want to go digging yourself, here’s where they came from:

• Reading Games for Readers, Novels, or Short Stories

• Fun with Readers

• Fun with Class Readers

• Fun with Class Readers 2

• Fun with Class Readers 3

• Post-Reading Activities for the Readers

• A Fun Activity for the Story You’re Reading in Class

I’ve chosen “Junk” as the next Song Mix&Match Lesson. “Junk” is a song written by Paul McCartney and released on his debut studio album in 1970. I chose this song because it’s one of my daughter’s favourite songs and she was just listening to it continuously the other day that it just started playing in my mind too and then I said why not — this beautiful, minimalistic, lesser known Paul McCartney song wouldn’t be my next song lesson to take into the classroom. I used it with my 1-on-1 student but created a whole lesson for class use. Here it is.

Level: Intermediate (B1) to Upper-Intermediate (B2)

Main Focus: To practise listening for specific information, expand vocabulary related to objects and consumerism, and critically analyse the concept of waste through reading and discussion.

Personal Aims: Meaning before form. Exploring the emotional weight of memory and consumerism before noticing the language structures.

Phase 1: Lead-in & Guided Imagery: Walking into an Antique Shop

“Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine you are walking down a quiet, narrow street on a rainy afternoon. You push open the heavy wooden door of an antique shop. A little bell rings. Inside, it smells of dust and wood. You look around.

On the left, there’s a shelf with old cameras, a broken clock, a pair of glasses. On the right, there are clothes: a coat, a pair of boots, a scarf. In the corner, there’s a box full of postcards, letters, old photographs.

You pick something up. It fits in your hand. You look at it.

What is it? Who owned it? How did it end up here?”

Follow-up:

Choose the set that best fits your class:

Set 1: Write a short paragraph:

Ask students to describe the object they chose and explain why they picked it. Ask if anybody volunteers to read.

Set 2: Discussion Questions:

• How does this place make you feel? Peaceful, curious, or a bit sad?

• Do you think the items in this shop are “treasures” or just “junk”? What makes the difference?

• Have you ever bought something second-hand? What was the story behind it?

Set 3:Discussion Questions:

• Have you ever been to a second-hand shop, a flea market, or an antique market? What did you find there?

• Do you find it easy or difficult to throw things away? Why?

• Can you think of something you own that you no longer use but can’t get rid of?

Phase 2: Key Vocabulary:

Introduce these key words to help students engage with the song and imagery.

• Junk (n.): Things that are considered useless, old, or of little value.

• A yard / junk yard (n.): An outdoor area where old cars, machinery, or discarded items are kept.

• To scrap (v.): To discard or throw away something because it is no longer useful.

• Bruised (adj.): Damaged or marked (usually used for skin or fruit, but here used poetically for an object).

• Consumerism (n.): The constant desire to buy manufactured goods, often driven by trends and advertising.

Phase 3: The Song: “Junk” by Paul McCartney

A) While-Listening

Tell students they are going to listen to a song written by Paul McCartney. Give them the following checklist of items. As they listen, they should tick only the items they actually hear mentioned in the song.

B) Post-Listening

Distribute the lyrics or display them on the board. Have students listen again and read along.

Song-Related Discussion:

Choose one of the sets that suits your class

Set 1

1. Look at the chorus. Who is arguing? What is the contrast between the shop window and the junk yard?

2. McCartney uses the phrase ‘broken-hearted jubilee.’ What do you think this means? Can a celebration be broken-hearted?

3. What is the mood of this song? How does it connect to our modern lives?

Set 2

1. What atmosphere does the song create?

2. Which emotions do you feel?

3. Is the singer telling a story?

4. What message do you think the song contains?

Set 3

1. What did you notice about the way the song is written?

2. What do all the objects have in common?

3. What do you think “Buy, buy says the sign in the shop window” means?

4. And “Why why, says the junk in the yard” — who is speaking here?

5. McCartney uses almost no sentences, only lists. Why might that be more powerful than a long explanation?

Phase 4: Reading Comprehension: Consumerism Today

For this stage, I used a reading text I generated with TeacherForge, an AI material composer built specifically for EFL and ESL teachers. I set the level to B1, gave it the topic — consumerism, buying unnecessary things, connecting to the song — and it produced a clean five-paragraph passage with comprehension tasks included.

I’ve written about TeacherForge in detail over on the blog: https://evasimkesyan.com/teacherforge-review-ai-tool-efl-teachers/

The reading lesson can be downloaded from here or you can ask an AI Tool to create an exercise using a reading text you already have:

Phase 5: Creative Tasks

Choose the one that fits your class:

Task 1:

Choose one specific object from the song or one item mentioned in the text (like a discarded smartphone from three years ago). Write a short paragraph (50–80 words) from the first-person perspective of that object.

• Who bought it?

• What was your favourite memory when you were useful?

• How did you end up in the junk yard?

Task 2:

Students choose one object they own.

They write:

• what it is

• how long they have had it

• why it matters

• what memories are connected to it

Then share in pairs.

Task 3:

Creative Speaking: If Objects Could Talk...

Choose one object.

Examples:

• an old teddy bear

• a bicycle

• a school bag

• a watch

• a phone

Students speak as the object:

“I’ve been with my owner for fifteen years...”

This activity links nicely to the personification found in the song.

Task 4:

Choose an old object in your home. Write a short diary entry from its perspective. Describe the people it has belonged to, the memories it has witnessed, and how it feels about being forgotten.

Task 5

Write your “Junk” Poem

Look back at how Paul McCartney wrote the lyrics to Junk. He doesn’t write long sentences; instead, he uses short chunks of words, lists items, and uses imagery to describe them (e.g., “Motor cars, handlebars, bicycles for two”).

Write your own version of the song/poem about the modern world.

• Step 1: Brainstorm 4–5 items we buy and throw away quickly today (e.g., old smartphones, clothes, plastic coffee cups).

• Step 2: Write your poem using the same style as the song: short lines and simple lists.

• Step 3: Try to include a 2-line chorus that contrasts what the advertisements say versus what the objects actually feel.

Phase 6: Exit Ticket / Wrap Up

This lesson deserves a conclusion. Choose one of the sets that is suitable for your students:

Option 1

On a sticky note or a slip of paper or a Padlet wall, ask students to write:

1. One word from today’s lesson they want to remember.

2. One idea from the song or reading that stayed with them.

3. One question they still have.

Option 2

Complete the sentence

One thing I will think about differently after today’s lesson is ...

Option 3: Rating Line

Students complete the statement:

“Something becomes valuable when...”

Option 4: Statement Rating

Ask them to rate their agreement (1–5):

Memories are more important than possessions.

1 2 3 4 5

Old objects tell stories.

1 2 3 4 5

People throw things away too easily today.

1 2 3 4 5

Junk is a simple song. On the surface, it is a list of old objects, but beneath those images lie questions about memory, value, and the way we consume. That combination makes it an excellent classroom text. Students can engage with it at different levels: as a listening activity, a discussion starter, a creative writing prompt, or a springboard into wider conversations about consumerism and modern life. As always with the Song Mix&Match series, feel free to adapt, combine, or replace activities to suit your learners.

You can download the handouts:

Reading Comprehension Junk As In The Beatles Song Consumerism Buying Unnecessary Things Answers

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Download

Reading Comprehension Junk As In The Beatles Song Consumerism Buying Unnecessary Things Material (1)

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Junk Lesson Plan Ajourneyinenglish

122KB ∙ PDF file

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In my recent post, Lesson Planning Essentials #2, I looked at the step-by-step framework of an inductive grammar lesson and explored how learners can move from meaning to form before gradually progressing from controlled to freer practice.

At the end of that post, I briefly mentioned something that often gets overlooked when planning grammar lessons: interaction patterns.

It’s easy to focus so much on the target language, the examples, and the practice activities that we forget to think about who is talking to whom.

Picture this. Students have noticed the target structure, worked out the rule, and completed a few controlled practice activities. Now it’s time for the productive stage.

What happens next?

Very often, the same familiar pattern takes over. Students work individually. They compare answers with the person sitting next to them. A few answers are checked as a whole class. Then everyone moves on.

There is nothing wrong with pair work or whole-class feedback. In fact, both are essential parts of a good lesson. The problem comes when they become the only interaction patterns learners experience.

Language learning is social. Learners need opportunities to negotiate meaning, adapt their language for different listeners, and communicate with people beyond their usual partner. If students spend every lesson speaking to the same classmate in the same seat, valuable opportunities for genuine communication are lost.

The good news is that changing interaction patterns doesn’t require elaborate preparation. Small adjustments can completely transform the energy in the room.

Here are five low-prep interaction patterns that can bring grammar practice to life.

1. Dictogloss

Best for: Controlled and guided practice

A Dictogloss is much more than a dictation activity. Instead of writing down every word, learners listen for meaning, take notes, and then work together to reconstruct the text.

How it works

Read a short text aloud at natural speed.

• First listening: students listen only.

• Second listening: students note key words and ideas.

• In groups, students reconstruct the text as accurately as possible.

Why it works

The reconstruction stage is where the learning happens. Learners discuss grammar choices, compare ideas, and justify their decisions.

If the target language is the past continuous, for example, the text might include sentences such as:

“While I was walking home, the wind was blowing and someone was following me.”

As students rebuild the text, they naturally focus on the grammatical patterns you’ve been teaching.

2. Inside-Outside Circles

Best for: Fluency practice

This is one of my favourite ways to increase speaking opportunities while keeping the activity highly structured.

How it works

Divide the class into two groups.

One group forms an inner circle facing outwards. The other forms an outer circle facing inwards so that everyone has a partner.

Give students a prompt using the target language.

They speak for about a minute, then the outer circle moves one place to the right and everyone gets a new partner.

Repeat several times.

Why it works

Students get multiple opportunities to practise the same language with different people. Each repetition builds confidence and fluency.

For a lesson on the Second Conditional, a prompt could be:

“What would you do if you won a trip anywhere in the world tomorrow?”

By the fourth conversation, even hesitant speakers are usually producing much longer and more accurate responses.

3. Grammar Marketplace

Best for: Information-gap activities

Instead of keeping information on a worksheet, spread it around the room.

How it works

Give each learner a unique piece of information. Their task is to gather information from classmates in order to complete a puzzle, solve a mystery, or finish a task.

Why it works

Students have a genuine reason to communicate. They need information that other people have.

For Present Perfect practice, learners might receive prompts such as:

“Find someone who has eaten snails.”

They then move around the room asking questions like:

“Have you ever eaten snails?”

The classroom quickly becomes lively and communicative, but the grammar focus remains clear.

4. Envoy Groups

Best for: Small-group free practice

Sometimes group discussions become isolated bubbles. Students complete a task, then wait for the teacher to ask for feedback.

Envoy Groups create a much wider audience.

How it works

Groups complete a task together using the target language.

Afterwards, one student from each group becomes the envoy and visits another group.

The envoy explains their group’s ideas, answers questions, and gathers information before returning to report back.

Why it works

Students become responsible for communicating ideas accurately to their peers rather than simply reporting to the teacher.

For example, if learners are planning a dream holiday using future forms, the envoy must explain the itinerary and answer follow-up questions from another group.

The communication feels much more authentic.

5. The Onion Ring Debate

Best for: Advanced learners

This structure works particularly well when grammar needs to be integrated into discussion and argumentation.

How it works

Arrange two rows of students facing each other.

Each pair debates a topic for a few minutes.

After each round, one row shifts along by one seat, creating new discussion partners.

The twist is that the grammatical requirement changes with each round.

Why it works

Students have to think about both meaning and form while adapting to new partners and new perspectives.

For example:

Round 1: Use at least two modal verbs of deduction.

• It must be...

• It might be...

• It can’t be...

Round 2: Use past modal forms.

• We should have...

• They could have...

• I might have...

The changing partners keep the discussion fresh and force learners to recycle the target language repeatedly.

A Quick Planning Checklist

The next time you plan a grammar lesson, look beyond the language target and think about the people in the room.

Ask yourself:

• Have my students spent the last three lessons talking to the same partner?

• Have they interacted with someone other than their desk neighbour today?

• Has the physical energy of the room changed at least once during the lesson?

• Have learners had opportunities to hear a variety of voices and ideas?

Movement isn’t a distraction from learning.

Quite the opposite.

A simple change in interaction pattern can increase engagement, encourage communication, and give learners more opportunities to use the language meaningfully.

And sometimes that’s exactly what a grammar lesson needs.

What about you?

Do you have a favourite interaction pattern that always energises a class? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

In EFL classrooms, we have so many more tools than drills, gap fills, and grammar charts. Songs, drama, technology, movies, animations, short stories, advertisements, art. In short, life itself. Almost anything can become a reason to speak, to listen, to think in another language.

A few years ago, a group of actors visited our school and performed with my students in the schoolyard. I watched the whole thing thinking “how can I use this?”

By the next day, we were already trying one of their games in class.

That’s where these activities come from. Not from a textbook, not from a methodology course, just from watching, borrowing, and adapting. Drama, movement, a little technology, and the willingness to just improvise.

Here are five activities that I’d like to share

Activity 1: I’m the Door
Level: Intermediate and above
Time: Up to you and your students
Aim: To practise relative clauses and vocabulary
Preparation: None

1. Ask students to stand up and form a semi-circle.

2. Tell them you will start the game by saying “I’m the door.”

3. A student comes forward, says a sentence related to the door, and acts as that thing. They may say “I’m the lock on the door”, pretending to be a lock.

4. A third student comes and completes the scene. They may say “I’m the key that opens the door.” The previous student decides who stays and may say “I want the key to stay here.”

5. The key then repeats “I’m the key that opens the door” and the game continues.

Activity 2: The Mime Swap
Level: Intermediate and above
Time: 10–15 minutes
Aim: To practise present continuous and vocabulary
Preparation: None

1. Ask students to stand up and find a space in the classroom.

2. Student A starts miming an action. For example, brushing their teeth.

3. While miming, Student A says a completely different action out loud: “I’m drinking a cup of coffee.”

4. Student B comes forward and mimes the action Student A has just said — drinking coffee — while saying something else: “I’m washing my hands.”

5. Student C mimes washing their hands while saying a new action: “I’m writing a letter.”

6. The game continues — each student mimes what the previous one said, while saying something new.

The trick is keeping the mime and the words completely different. It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly tricky and challenging — and always gets a laugh.

Activity 3: Are You Listening?
Level: Intermediate and above
Time: 10–15 minutes
Aim: To raise awareness of listening skills and practise expressing frustration
Preparation: Role cards A and B

1. Prepare two sets of role cards before class.

2. Card A: You have just won a scholarship and you are very enthusiastic. You know your life will be very different from now on and you want to talk about it with your friend.

3. Card B: Your friend wants you to listen, but don’t. Avoid eye contact, interrupt, change the subject. Whenever they try to come back to the topic, make it clear you are not interested.

4. Put students in pairs. Give each student a card. Do not let them see each other’s cards.

5. Ask them to start the conversation. Give them 3–4 minutes.

6. Stop and ask Student A: How did you feel? What did your partner do?

7. Reveal the cards to the whole class and open up a discussion: Why is listening important? What makes a good listener?

Student As are always genuinely frustrated — and that’s exactly the point.

Activity 4: Freeze!
Level: Intermediate and above
Time: 10–15 minutes
Aim: To practise spontaneous speaking and present continuous
Preparation: None

1. Ask two students to come to the front of the class.

2. Give them a simple scenario to act out — “You are at a bus stop” or “You are in a café.”

3. They begin improvising the scene freely.

4. After 20–30 seconds, call “Freeze!” — both students stop and hold their exact positions.

5. A third student taps one of the frozen students on the shoulder. That student sits down.

6. The new student takes the exact same position and starts a completely new scene based on that position.

7. Call “Freeze!” again after another 20–30 seconds and repeat.

8. Continue until most students have had a turn.

The magic is in the positions — a student frozen mid-reach might become someone picking apples, hailing a taxi, or reaching for a star. The stranger the better.

Activity 5: The AI Speaking Coach
Level: Intermediate and above
Time: 15–20 minutes (or set as homework)
Aim: To practise speaking exam skills and build vocabulary
Preparation: Access to ChatGPT or a similar AI tool

1. Tell students they are going to practise for a speaking exam using an AI tool.

2. Ask them to open ChatGPT and type: “I need to practise for a speaking exam. Please give me 5 questions on the topic of [technology / the environment / education].”

3. The AI generates a list of questions. Students choose one and type their answer.

4. If the answer is too short, the AI will suggest how to expand it. If it’s longer, it will offer more advanced vocabulary and structures.

5. Students note down two or three new words or phrases the AI suggests.

6. In the follow-up class, share these on the board and practise them together.

The AI becomes a patient, always-available speaking partner that never gets tired of your questions.

Final Thoughts

Teaching a language is a little like improvisation.

We don’t always know what will happen when students enter the classroom. A simple activity can turn into something unexpected. A sentence can become a story. A mistake can become a joke. A game can become a meaningful conversation.

That’s why I love bringing drama and creativity into my EFL classroom.

These activities are not magic tricks, and they don’t replace careful planning or clear learning aims. They simply remind us that language is not only something we analyse, it is something we use, play with, and experience.

Sometimes the best classroom moments come from being willing to try something new.

To borrow from Gershwin:

“Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise.”

And maybe teaching is, too.

Songs have always been an important part of my teaching. Seeing my husband, who has no formal English learning experience, being able to communicate fluently in English simply because of his love for music encouraged me to integrate songs into my own classrooms. I use these songs for various purposes: sometimes for grammar presentation or listening comprehension, other times for speaking practice, and most frequently for creative writing and critical thinking.

I recently wrote a post on my blog about why using songs is a great idea, where I also shared a few activities. That inspired me to start sharing song-based lesson plans more regularly again, just like I used to do. From now on, I’ll be sharing these song lessons right here on my Substack.

Following up on that blog post, I’ve decided to kick off this series with “Thank You for the Music” by ABBA. In this post, you will find a complete, ready-to-use 45-minute lesson framework. It is completely modular. You can either follow the step-by-step sequential plan, or you can swap out the grammar focus for the creative writing or speaking extension activities provided at the bottom. The choice is yours!

How to Build Your 45-Minute Lesson

To help you pace your class, choose one of the pathways below, or mix and match the activities to suit your students’ needs:

• The Full Sequential Framework: Build-up (12 min) ➔ Listening Core (15 min) ➔ Grammar & Drilling (15 min) + Buffer.

• The Creative Writing Pathway: Build-up (12 min) ➔ Listening Core (15 min) ➔ “Thank You For...” Writing Task (15 min) + Buffer.

• The Communicative Speaking Pathway: Build-up (12 min) ➔ Listening Core (15 min) ➔ Mind Map or Survival Scenario Groups (15 min) + Buffer.

The Lesson Plan: “Thank You for the Music”

• Level: B1 / B2 (Teenagers / Adults)

• Skills: Listening, speaking, vocabulary, critical thinking, creative writing

• Language Focus: Listening comprehension, Time Clauses, expressing opinions

Part 1: Warm-up & Build-up (12 mins total)

Activity 1: Agree / Disagree Line (7 min)

Instructions: Designate different areas of your classroom as AGREE, DISAGREE, or NOT SURE. Read the following statements aloud and ask students to physically move to the area that matches their opinion.

Statements:

1. Life without music would still be enjoyable.

2. Talent is more important than practice in music.

3. Music can change emotions instantly.

4. Music is mainly for entertainment, not communication.

Speaking Focus: Once students are standing in their areas, ask them to justify their choices in small groups, then share with the whole class using frames like:

• “I agree because…”

• “I disagree because…”

• “In my opinion…”

Activity 2: Quote Interpretation (5 min)

Instructions: Project or write these two quotes on the board. Have students discuss them in pairs.

• “What would life be without a song or a dance?”

• “Nothing can capture a heart like a melody.”

Discussion Questions:

• What do these quotes mean ?

• Do you agree with them? Why or why not?

• Can you share a real-life example of a melody capturing your heart?

Part 2: The Core Listening Element (15 mins total)

Activity 3: Listening Comprehension & Feedback (15 min)

Teachers can use the printable Canva handout layout provided below for this segment.

Instructions:

1. Pre-Listening (3 min): Distribute the handout. Instruct students to actively scan the fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions before the audio starts. This helps them anticipate the information they need.

2. While Listening (8 min): Play the song twice. During the first play, focus on Part 1 (word completion). During the second play, focus on Part 2 (comprehension and True/False).

3. Post-Listening (4 min): Have students check their answers in pairs before reviewing them as a whole class.

Part 3: Choose Your 15-Minute Target Activity

Pick ONE of the options below to close out your 45-minute lesson, or save the others for a follow-up class!

Option A: The Grammar Route (Time Clauses)

Activity 4: Grammar Discovery — “Time Clauses Detective” (7 min)

Distribute the full song lyrics. Project this specific line on the board:

“I was a dancer before I could walk.”

Detective Questions (Pair Work):

• Which action happened first?

• Which word connects the two actions?

• Can we reverse the order of the sentence? (Guide them to discover: “Before I could walk, I was a dancer.”)

Elicit more personal examples from students’ own lives to fill in these stems:

• I learned to use a smartphone before...

• I started secondary school after...

• I felt nervous when...

The “Notice Box” Reference:

• before: I was a dancer before I could walk.

• after: After I joined the band, I became confident.

• when: I smile when I hear this song.

• while: I sing while I study.

• since: I’ve loved music since I was six.

Activity 5: Fun Drilling — Musical Sentence Chain (8 min)

Setup: Have the class sit or stand in a circle.

• Teacher starts: “I was singing before I came to school.”

• Student 1 continues: “Before I came to school, I listened to a song that I love.”

• Student 2 follows: “I listened to a song that I love after I finished my homework.”

• Student 3 follows: “After I finished my homework, I watched a video that made me laugh.”

The Rules: Every single sentence must contain one time clause and must remain connected to the theme of music or daily habits.

Option B: The Creative Writing Route

Activity 6: Writing Task — “Thank You For...” (15 min)

Task (Individual): Students draft a reflective mini-text titled “Thank You for ______”. They can choose a hobby, a person, an object, or an experience.

Target Requirements:

• Word count: 120–150 words

• Must include at least 3 time clauses

• Must include at least 3 relative clauses

• Must express present feelings

Teacher Model to Share:

Thank you for basketball, which has become an important part of my life. Before I joined the team, I was quite shy. After I started training regularly, I became more confident. The friends who play with me every week always encourage me. When I feel stressed, basketball helps me relax. The memories that we’ve created together make me happy, and I’m grateful for them every day.

Extension: Students who feel comfortable can read their texts aloud to their peers.

Printable Lesson Handout & Answer Key

Part 1 – While Listening

A. Listen and complete the sentences using ONE WORD ONLY.

1. The singer says she is not ________, in fact, a bit of a bore.

2. Everyone listens when she starts to __________.

3. She asks, “What would ___________ be?”

4. Her mother says she was a dancer before she could __________.

5. The singer believes nothing can capture a heart like a __________.

6. She describes herself as the girl with golden __________.

Part 2 – Post-Listening

B. Listen to the song and choose the best answer.

1. How does the singer describe herself at the beginning?

   • A) Talented and confident

   • B) Ordinary and not very interesting

   • C) Funny and entertaining

2. What special ability does the singer mention?

   • A) Writing songs

   • B) Dancing

   • C) Singing

3. According to the singer, music brings people:

   • A) money

   • B) joy

   • C) friendship

4. What is the overall message of the song?

   • A) Music is essential in life

   • B) Fame is difficult

   • C) Childhood memories are important

C. True / False / Not Given Write T (True), F (False), or NG (Not Given):

1. The singer thinks she is very special. _____

2. The singer believes jokes are her greatest strength. _____

3. The singer started singing before speaking. _____

4. The singer feels lucky in life. _____

🔑 Answer Key

• Part 1: 1. special | 2. sing | 3. life | 4. walk | 5. melody | 6. hair

• Part 2 (MCQ): 1. B | 2. C | 3. B | 4. A

• Part 2 (T/F/NG): 1. F | 2. F | 3. T | 4. T

Alternative Extension Activity Menu

These options are perfect to turn into downloadable “Lesson Idea Cards” on Canva!

Creative Writing Options

1. “A World Without Music” (120–160 words): Start with the prompt: “One morning, I woke up and something was missing…” Students focus on narrative tenses to describe how society copes without sound.

2. Guided Summary Writing (60–80 words): Students write a concise summary explaining the singer’s feelings, the central importance of music, and the song’s overall message.

3. “If Music Could Talk” (5–6 lines): A personification exercise. Students write from the perspective of music talking to humanity. Optional starter: “I travel through your headphones…”

Collaborative Group Work

1. “Music Is…” Mind Map Challenge (Groups of 3–4): Groups get 8 minutes to sketch a map connecting music to emotions, travel, celebrations, and life events. They present their map to the class in exactly 60 seconds.

2. Survival Scenario: No-Music World (Groups of 4–5): A critical thinking scenario where music has systematically vanished. Groups must decide what psychological problems would emerge and map out creative human solutions.

Communicative Pair Work

1. Deeper Quote Interpretation (8–10 min): A focused speaking task unpacking the literal and emotional meaning of the song’s core lines.

2. “Would You Rather?” Cards (8–10 min): Quick-fire debates. Partners must choose one side and justify it:

   • Live without music OR live without films?

   • Be a famous singer OR a behind-the-scenes songwriter?

   • Listen to only one song forever OR live in complete silence?

Download the Complete “Thank You for the Music” Handout Packet (PDF)

Hi everyone! We’ve all been there: you design a great lesson, half the class is still working on task, and suddenly that one brilliant student raises their hand and says, ‘I’m finished! Now what?’ Today, I’m sharing a comprehensive guide to turning ‘fast finishers’ into a wonderful classroom opportunity rather than a management challenge.

This is the fast finisher problem.

And it has been part of every mixed ability classroom I have ever taught in. However, now years later, I know that before we jump to solutions, there is something worth thinking about. Not all fast finishers are the same. There is the student who processed the task quickly and is ready to go deeper. There is the student who rushed through, produced something incomplete, and decided they were done. And then there is the one who has not really finished at all, but has decided that looking finished is easier than continuing.

Three different students. Three different needs. One label. And recognising which one is sitting in front of you changes everything.

What Fast Finishers Actually Need

They do not need more of the same. Finishing an exercise and being handed another identical one is not the solution. It may even be a punishment for being quick. The message, even if we do not mean to send it, is clear: if you finish faster, you’ll get more.

They do not need something completely unrelated to the lesson either. What fast finishers actually need is to go one step further, not to kill time.

If the lesson is about the past simple, the fast finisher task should still be on the past simple. If the class is working on a reading text about climate change, the extension should be related to that same topic.

However, we need to be sure what type of fast finisher we have because sometimes what looks like a fast finisher is actually a student who needs a different kind of support altogether. Then the teacher should be there to encourage the student to complete the activity.

So before we prepare a collection of extra activities for early finishers, it is worth asking a simpler question:

What does this student actually need right now?

For years, the fast finisher solution lived in a jar or an envelope or a laminated card stuck to the wall. We prepared a collection of Pinterest inspired generic tasks in advance, waiting for that moment when a student looked up and said, “I’m done.”

Yes, it was the best solution we had but those tasks were general and they were not connected to this class, this level, or these particular topic. They were fillers that saved that exact moment if the student was willing to complete because deep down the student was also aware that these were there to keep him/her busy as they wouldn’t be collected, shared, recycled or commented.

Now we can do much better than this using the tools we have around us. Maybe one day AI will replace the teachers, I don’t know but I believe, we are not there yet. We still need to decide what our students need, what is appropriate, and what is worth their time and as they are here and will obviously stay, we can use them as our assistants.

Jars are fun, gives the feeling of randomness. We can still keep them on the shelves but AI can also do something which will help our students more.

It can help us create something that belongs to that specific day.

Think about this: You are teaching a B1 class of sixteen-year-olds. Today’s lesson is on reported speech. You know your students and you are sure that at least three of them will finish the tasks sooner than others so before class you can prepare something for them.

While preparing these tasks, the most important thing is the prompt and for the prompt the questions to ask ourselves as the right questions help us design better activities.For example:

• What level are they really at?

• What skill do I want to extend?

• What language should they practise?

• What kind of thinking am I asking for?

What Good Fast Finisher Tasks Look Like

Fast Finisher tasks should stay connected to the lesson without simply adding more of the same.

Let’s have a look at a few fast finisher tasks

Vocabulary

Take the target vocabulary from the lesson and

• Create a word map for one of the target words. Include synonyms, antonyms, collocations, an example sentence, and a personal connection.

Grammar

• Take a short paragraph written in one tense and rewrite it in another. Notice what changes and what stays the same.

Reading

• Summarise the text in exactly 30 words.

Writing

Take your own writing from today and

• Rewrite the same piece in a completely different register. If it was formal, make it informal. If it was serious, add humour.

Speaking Preparation

• Write a 60-second mini talk on today’s topic. Something you could actually deliver to the class.

All these tasks are wonderful and can be completed independently and they can then be shared, displayed, discussed, or returned to. That last point matters more than it might seem. When fast finishers know their work will be seen, read, or used, not just collected and forgotten, the task gains a real purpose and it becomes part of the learning.

The Prompt Template

As I said, when you know your class well, you can easily guess if you will have fast finishers on that day’s lesson and you can prepare the task in advance. If you have access to internet and mobile tools in class, then you can even prepare a task for the unpredictable fast-finisher of that day in the class.

The most important thing is the prompt template. All we need is a ready-made class-specific prompt tailored to our needs. Something you type once, adjust slightly each time.

Here is the one I suggest. I improved it with the help of AI. I simply wrote what I needed and it guided me with questions to add more to get what I want.

“You are helping an EFL teacher create a fast finisher task. The students are [CEFR level], [age group], [grade if relevant]. Today’s lesson focus is [topic or skill]. The target language is [vocabulary list or grammar structure]. Create one fast finisher task that extends the lesson without introducing new content. The task should take between 5 and 10 minutes, require no teacher input to complete, and encourage deeper thinking rather than more practice of the same type. Keep the instructions simple and student-facing.”

Now let’s see it in action.

Example 1: Vocabulary lesson, secondary learners

You are helping an EFL teacher create a fast finisher task. The students are B1, teenage learners, grade 10. Today’s lesson focus is vocabulary. The target vocabulary is: anxious, relieved, frustrated, overwhelmed, ashamed, proud. Create one fast finisher task that extends the lesson without introducing new content. The task should take between 5 and 10 minutes, require no teacher input to complete, and encourage deeper thinking rather than more practice of the same type. Keep the instructions simple and student-facing.

AI output:

Example 2: Reading lesson, adult learners

You are helping an EFL teacher create a fast finisher task. The students are B2, adult learners. Today’s lesson focus is a reading text about the future of remote work. Create one fast finisher task that extends the lesson without introducing new content. The task should take between 5 and 10 minutes, require no teacher input to complete, and encourage deeper thinking rather than more practice of the same type. Keep the instructions simple and student-facing.

AI output:

This template is a sample, but you can adjust it. You will notice that some additions make a difference. Over time, you will develop your own version. AI works best when the teacher guides the tool. It generates but you improve then it becomes yours. It is your pedagogy and your class. You know your students better. AI helps you find solutions. In this case, it simply does the job that the old fast finisher jar was trying to do, but faster and the best thing here is not the speed but the task which is connected to that day’s lesson.

How do you usually handle fast finishers in your own EFL classrooms? Do you have a favorite go-to activity that never fails? Drop a comment below and let's share our best strategies!

This post was originally published on my blog. If you want to read more about classroom management strategies and digital integration, don't forget to check out evasimkesyan.com.

One of the biggest challenges in learning English has always been vocabulary.

Not because students don’t meet enough words. In fact, today students are surrounded by words more than ever. They can ask AI for vocabulary lists, generate examples, create flashcards, and translate almost anything in seconds.

But knowing a word is not the same as using a word.

A word becomes part of our language when we play with it, use it, connect it to other words, and bring it back from memory again and again.

That’s why I still love vocabulary games.

They are simple, sometimes old-fashioned, and surprisingly powerful. They create the repetition our brains need, but they also add something technology cannot replace: interaction.

So I took an old blog post I wrote back in 2023, sprinkled a little AI dust on, and added some new activities that can work with different ages and levels.

Before the games: let AI do the boring part

AI is actually a great assistant for vocabulary work. Teachers can use it to:

• create word lists around a theme

• generate example sentences

• make different difficulty versions

• create strange stories using target vocabulary

• prepare picture prompts

But magic happens when learners do something with those words.

1. Word Ladders

Instead of only changing letters, ask AI to create a ladder where each step changes meaning:

cat → ??? → ??? → dog

Students guess the missing steps and explain the connection.

Or:

“Create a word ladder from an easy A2 word to a B2 word.”

2. Vocabulary Auction: “Would you buy this word?”

Add a discussion layer:

Students receive imaginary money.

They bid on words.

But before buying, they must explain:

• “This word is useful because…”

• “I think I will use this word when…”

The goal is not only knowing words but judging their value.

3. The AI Detective Game

Give students an AI-generated paragraph with mistakes:

“The old man was very enormous and tiny at the same time.”

Students have to:

• find strange word choices

• replace them

• explain why

Great for collocations and nuance.

4. Word Rescue

Put forgotten words on the board.

Students “save” them by giving them:

• a synonym

• an opposite

• a sentence

• a personal connection

• a drawing

5. The 5-Second Story

Give students 5 random vocabulary words.

They have 30 seconds to create a mini story.

AI version:

Ask AI:

“Create a funny story using these 5 words, but leave blanks.”

Students complete the story.

6. Vocabulary Charades 2.0

Old game, new version.

Students cannot say the word.

They can:

• act it

• draw it

• describe it

• give an example

7. Memory Palace Lite

Instead of memorizing a list:

Students create a “place” in their imagination.

“The kitchen has 5 new words.”
“The garden has 5 new words.”

They walk through the place and retrieve vocabulary.

Maybe the future of vocabulary learning is not about replacing old methods with new technology.

Maybe it is about combining them.

AI can help us find words.

Teachers can help learners experience words.

And games can help those words stay.

Checking with AI

After publishing the first part of this experiment, I became curious about something.

The original aim was actually quite simple. I thought that AI-generated writing would contain certain clues that would reveal itself. We often hear people say, “I can tell this was written by AI.” As teachers, many of us have started noticing certain patterns as well.

So I wondered: if those clues really exist, can AI see them too?

I copied the three paragraphs from my previous post and asked ChatGPT and Gemini to identify the writers.

The results were interesting.

Both tools immediately recognised my paragraph. They pointed out the details about the mother standing on the stairs and the image of balcony. They said that these details made the text feel personal and connected to a real experience. According to them, this was one of the reasons why they thought that paragraph had been written by a human.

The other two paragraphs were also recognised as AI-generated.

ChatGPT and Gemini described them as clean, well-organised, grammatically accurate, and structured step by step. They also mentioned that the descriptions felt more general. They described a house rather than a particular home. There was no personal memory, no individual perspective, and no emotional connection to a specific place.

In other words, they did recognise many of the features we often associate with AI writing.

So my original assumption was not completely wrong.

What surprised me was something else.

Although they recognised AI-generated writing, they could not identify which AI model had written which paragraph.

ChatGPT was not very good at recognising ChatGPT.

Gemini was not very good at recognising Gemini.

They could see the fingerprints of AI, but they could not identify the owner of those fingerprints.

Then Claude Entered the Experiment

At this point, I wanted another proof.

I copied the same paragraphs and asked Claude to identify the writers.

It did surprisingly well. It easily identified all three writers.

Then I became curious again.

What would Claude write if I gave it exactly the same prompt?

To be honest, I expected something similar to what ChatGPT and Gemini had produced. After all, they had all received the same task.

I started a new chat. I copied and pasted the task.

And...

Well, I was speechless. Here is what it generated:

“My mother said it so plainly over the phone — it is done, they signed — as if she were telling me the soup was ready.

I was standing in my kitchen in a country that still sometimes feels borrowed, stirring coffee I had already forgotten about. The news arrived and then just... stayed inside my chest without finding a place to sit.

That house was not beautiful by any measure. The staircase creaked on the fourth step. The bathroom tiles were the color of old teeth. But it was the place where I knew, without thinking, which light switch was which. Where my hands moved in the dark with a confidence I have never quite rebuilt elsewhere.

People say home is where the heart is, and I always found this phrase a little lazy. But standing there, spoon in hand, I finally understood what displacement actually weighs.

It weighs exactly like silence on the other end of a phone call.”

And mine was this:

“My mom sold the house I grew up in and gave the keys to me to hand them to the new owner. I wanted to go there for one more time. I opened the door and there I heard the sounds that had clung to the walls, the echoes of our family story told by my grandmother and grandfather in the room next to the front door would be lost. I watched the beautiful silhouette of my mother on the staircase climbing up from the living room to the bedroom. I was feeling dizzy. I was sad. The house was going to be demolished.

As I stepped out the door, I turned back for one last look. The empty windows, their curtains removed, were sending me off with sadness. I wanted to leave, yet I couldn’t bring myself to go. It was as if I was saying goodbye to someone I loved. The place where I grew up, where I became who I am, would no longer exist. I told myself it was time to let go of the sorrows I had silently wept on that little balcony. I tucked all the beautiful memories I had lived into my heart, and quietly stepped out the door.”

See, the borrowed vocabulary, the feeling...

It sounded much closer to my own writing style than I had expected.

I know I had already pasted my paragraph into Claude’s conversation to see if it would guess the “writers” correctly” so it had already seen the written paragraphs but it was in a separate chat. Well, if I had started with a completely fresh conversation and asked for the writing task first, perhaps the result would have looked much more like the responses from ChatGPT and Gemini.

I honestly do not know.

One More Step

Now I had four paragraphs: one from Gemini, one from ChatGPT, one from Claude, and one from me.

I gave all four paragraphs to ChatGPT and Gemini and asked them to identify the writers again.

The results were even more interesting.

They still recognised my paragraph quite easily.

However, both of them thought that Claude’s paragraph had probably been written by a human and later polished by AI.

So What Does This Mean for Us?

When I started this experiment I was thinking that I would be able to show my students how their writing and AI generated texts were different and now I think more about where teaching stands.

For me, the most important thing we teach is no longer knowledge. Knowledge is everywhere.

What matters is helping students think critically, creatively, and independently.

These are the skills that help them evaluate information, solve problems, form opinions, and develop their own voices.

Those skills need practice.

And as educators, I think we should find more ways to practise these skills in our classrooms.

This post was originally published on A Journey in TEFL.

In a world where the number of AI users is increasing every other day, teachers’ responsibility to teach students how to use it is becoming essential. We should teach our students to use AI ethically and we should also become AI literate. Our students are mostly feeding the tools they are using with the tasks we assign them and copying the results into a Word document to hand in. We are often helpless when it comes to detecting AI-generated work, as AI checker tools are not very reliable. However, we can easily identify AI-generated texts by their flawlessness, lack of personal voice, use of predictable linking words, overuse of em-dashes, overly clear paragraphing, and word choice. In addition, we know our our students’ classroom performance and, of course, we have our instincts.

This is something I want to try with my students to show how we actually write, how AI generates and how we can identify who has written what.

This is a prompt I worked on:

“Write about the moment you realized your childhood home was sold. Word limit 150-160 words.”

First, I wrote a response, then prompted ChatGPT and Gemini:

“Write about the moment you realized your childhood home was sold. You are a non-native fluent English speaker. 150-160 words.”

1. It happened on a rainy afternoon, entirely out of the blue, while I was casually scrolling through a local real estate app. There it was—the unmistakable facade of my childhood home, stamped with a cold, definitive “SOLD” banner across the listing photo. A sudden, sharp ache bloomed in my chest, catching me completely off guard. The digital image felt like a betrayal; those walls, which had sheltered my loudest laughter and deepest teenage angst, had officially been reduced to mere square footage and a transaction number.

In that fleeting second, the finality of moving on truly hit me. I realized that the creaky third step of the staircase, the secret notch carved into the kitchen doorframe marking my height, and the sprawling backyard tree where I used to dream no longer belonged to my history. They were now just background noise in a stranger’s new beginning.

2. I realized my childhood home had been sold on a quiet Sunday afternoon while I was scrolling through old messages on my phone. My mother casually mentioned that the new owners had already started renovating the kitchen, and for a few seconds I could not even respond. It felt strange that a place which had once contained every important memory of my early life now belonged to complete strangers. I suddenly remembered the faded wallpaper in the hallway, the sound of rain hitting my bedroom window, and the small marks on the wall that my father used to measure my height every year. Although I had not lived there for a long time, I always believed that the house would somehow remain untouched, waiting for me in the background of my life.

What surprised me most was not sadness alone, but the realization that childhood itself had quietly become something distant and unreachable. A house is only bricks and furniture, yet we attach entire versions of ourselves to those spaces. Knowing that another family would create their own routines there made me understand how temporary everything truly is. At the same time, I felt grateful because the house had already fulfilled its purpose: it gave me safety, laughter, and memories that still shape who I am today. In the end, I understood that home is not a physical place anymore, but a collection of moments that continue to live inside me.

3. My mom sold the house I grew up in and gave the keys to me to hand them to the new owner. I wanted to go there for one more time. I opened the door and there I heard the sounds that had clung to the walls, the echoes of our family story told by my grandmother and grandfather in the room next to the front door would be lost. I watched the beautiful silhouette of my mother on the staircase climbing up from the living room to the bedroom. I was feeling dizzy. I was sad. The house was going to be demolished.

As I stepped out the door, I turned back for one last look. The empty windows, their curtains removed, were sending me off with sadness. I wanted to leave, yet I couldn’t bring myself to go. It was as if I was saying goodbye to someone I loved. The place where I grew up, where I became who I am, would no longer exist. I told myself it was time to let go of the sorrows I had silently wept on that little balcony. I tucked all the beautiful memories I had lived into my heart, and quietly stepped out the door.

Can you identify which one is written by me? Why?

And can you identify which paragraph is written by which tool?

And here is the lesson idea that you can try with your learners:

Write a paragraph on any topic you want to work on. Ask two different AI tools to generate the same paragraph. Copy the paragraphs into a Word document, put students in groups, and ask them to identify which one was written by you and justify their answers.

If you try this, please let me know how it went.

One of the biggest challenges in language teaching is not teaching grammar. It’s getting students to actually use it. We often plan lessons that are clear, structured, and well-sequenced, but still end up with passive participation.

Over time, I’ve learned that simple activities that can be reused, adapted, and reused again with different language points might actually be a solution for this problem.

Below are five classroom activities that require minimal preparation but consistently generate interaction, vocabulary retrieval, and student engagement.

1. Categories

Divide the class into two teams.

Explain the rules: you will give a category, and students must quickly think of related words.

Call two students from each team to the board.

Set a timer for two minutes and ask them to write as many words as they can.

Possible categories:

• Things in a fridge

• Things you can buy in a supermarket

• Expensive items

• Things you can find in a living room

• Personality adjectives

This works well as a warm-up or vocabulary activation task. The competitive element adds energy, but the real value lies in retrieval speed and lexical range.

2. Right Word, Wrong Place

Prepare a handout using newly learned structures or short topic-related sentences.

Then, intentionally create errors by swapping the positions of two words in each sentence.

Students must correct the sentences by identifying what has been misplaced and reconstructing the correct version.

This activity pushes learners to notice structure more carefully and strengthens grammatical awareness without turning into a traditional grammar explanation.

3. Catch the Words

Draw a large circle on the board and fill it with random letters. Students must form as many words as possible using those letters.

Alternatively, prepare a handout with jumbled versions of recently studied vocabulary.

This is a simple but effective way to reinforce spelling, word recognition, and mental flexibility with language.

4. Dialogues

Write short sentences on slips of paper (or have students create them themselves).

Put students into pairs.

Give each pair four slips, ideally containing the same sentences.

Their task is to build a natural dialogue that includes all four sentences.

This works especially well for encouraging fluency, creativity, and pragmatic use of language. Students naturally focus on meaning while still being constrained by target structures.

5. Comprehension Questions

Write the topic of a reading or listening text on the board.

Ask students to copy it and write one question about the topic.

Then they pass their paper to another student, who adds a new question. The process continues until each paper has circulated around the class.

Finally, students read the text and check whether any of the questions written by their classmates are actually answered.

This simple shift from answering questions to creating them changes how students engage with texts and increases curiosity before reading.

Why I often use them

What I like about these activities is that they are reusable. They don’t depend on a specific textbook but they can supplement them too.

These five activities are simple to set up, flexible to adapt, and consistently productive in practice.

How about you? What are your favourite low-prep activities that your students love very much?