Author: Nancy Callan

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Geography Vocabulary Speaking Game

When studying about Canada (or America, Australia, etc.) with a beginner class, students need to know some basic geography words. Here are nine essential simple geography words: 

  • mountain
  • hills
  • prairie
  • ocean
  • lake
  • river
  • island
  • valley
  • forest

Download this set of matching cards below for your students to practice this geography vocabulary by clicking any of the images below. Each photograph featured is in the public domain under a CC0 licence so can be copied. 

Scroll below for a fun speaking game to practice the vocabulary. 

Geography Vocabulary Speaking Game

This speaking game has always been a hit with my students.

Show students the geography image cards and ask them, “Which one of these is most like you?” Are you a mountain? A river? A prairie?

Explain (using vocabulary suitable for your class’ level) that a person who identifies with a mountain is very dramatic and extroverted. He or she is known by everyone and has a voice that projects well. My experience is that after this first explanation, students understand and anticipate easily which human characteristics are identified with each geographical feature and you can usually elicit the characteristics with a bit of prompting.

Here are my associations: The person who identifies with the ocean has dramatic emotional variability but may not be the centre of attention the way the mountain is. The person who identifies with a hill has some ups and downs, but is less dramatic than the mountain and ocean. The person who identifies with the prairie is very open and sunny with no real mood swings. The person who identifies with a lake tends to be calm and maybe romantic. The person who identifies with a river never stops moving. The person who identifies with an island tends to be a loner. The person who identifies with the valley tends to be depressed. The person who identifies with the forest is an introvert who is not easily understood.

First ask students to write down which geographical feature they identify with and to think about why. Ask the class to guess each student’s choice before students share their own choice and explain their reasons. This game makes for a fun discussion and getting to know you exercise. 

Quite surprisingly, each year, my classes have identified the same geographical feature for me—one I actually had not thought of for myself—calling out, “You’re a river!”

This vocabulary game is useful for Callan’s Beginner Canada Jigsaws and Callan’s New Canada Jigsaws:

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Teaching the Alphabet: Literacy 101

Adult literacy students range from pre-literate to non-literate to semi-literate to those from non-Roman alphabets. Some do not know how to hold a pencil. I’ve had students with no idea when their birthday was because they came from cultures where no one knew dates or years. Some students from non-Roman alphabets may know the names of all the letters of the alphabet but have little knowledge of the sounds of any letters. Trouble writing on the line, confusion between upper and lower case, and some letters backwards or reversed are all clues that a student may fit in this category of students. 

Just as in all lower level classes, because literacy students do not yet know the spelling and grammatical conventions of English and are learning them from you, it is very important to be consistent in your use of upper and lower case in board work.

When you assign alphabet practice for homework (or classwork), take time to go over each student’s work in class with a coloured pen. I suspect the reason many teachers don’t do this is because they don’t want to talk down to adult students or to place too much emphasis on something they deem an elementary school skill. The fact is if you have true literacy students, they put a lot of effort into an exercise like this. Tasks requiring fine motor skills take time to learn. Taking time to check their work acknowledges this effort and shows that you deem it important. Your students will correspondingly value the exercise more. I go over each letter and take time to point out when a letter is beautifully formed. I also point out when the proportions are not quite right.

Here are some tips for teaching the alphabet. At the bottom, you’ll find some alphabet sheets free for you to download and use in your own class. 

     1.  Start by introducing letters that have similar shapes, for example c, e, and o or l, i, t.  

     2.  Discriminate between shapes.  Focus the attention of students on differences. Don’t assume they already see them. Write the lower case alphabet on the board, naming each letter as it is written and repeat that several times.

     3.  Use alphabet hand-outs that have students trace over the letters and then write them themselves several times on the line. 

     4.  Name letters and have students circle them on a hand-out.

     5.  Demonstrate stroke order on the board, insisting that students use the correct stroke order. 

     6.  Teach upper case.  Use hand-outs with exercises asking students to match upper and lower case.  At this point, you might wish to draw students attention to the typewritten and handwritten lower case a, which often confuses students.

     7.  Play a concentration game with students matching upper and lower case letters.

     8.  Teach students when to use capital letters. 

     9.  Move on to sounds after students have fully memorized the names of letters. 

Check out Callan’s Beginner Essentials, which moves systematically through the sounds of the alphabet, using a scaffolding approach to build on knowledge. The book is “sanitized for your protection” in that there are no difficult to depict words or words students would be unlikely to encounter. Virtually every word is 6 letters or less and follows the spelling conventions of English. There will be plenty of time later for students to get discouraged by all the exceptions to the rule!

Click on the page below to download some alphabet practice pages for your own use. 

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Soft-Skill: Correcting Name Pronunciation

Of course it is important as teachers to learn to pronounce our students’ names correctly. It is also important to empower students to advocate for the correct pronunciation of their own names. We teach beginner and intermediate ESL students name introductions  but do we teach them how to politely correct people who mispronounce their names? 

Watch Hasan Minhaj as he teaches Ellen Degeneres how to pronounce his name  and discusses the, er, ethnocentrism involved in which names we make an effort to learn to pronounce and which we give up on:  https://twitter.com/hasanminhaj/status/1113952740596768771

Feel free to download this simple practice below for use in your own classroom by clicking on the image.

Check out another Introductions lesson here.

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Page Directions for Low Beginner

I’ve created an interactive activity for low beginner ESL to practice page directions. Your class will run smoother if you can draw students’ attention to where the class is looking on the page you’re working on and make sure everyone is following. You’re welcome to download my materials to use in your classroom.

I let students take turns calling out different page directions and having their classmates move shapes at their desks to follow the instructions. This game can be played over and over until students feel very familiar with page directions.

First, students will need to learn vocabulary such as: up, down, left, right, in the middle, at the top, and in the corner. 

My activity uses the shapes circle, square, triangle and rectangle. You will need a set of shapes for each student (or each pair of students). Download them here.

First, you need to practice the vocabulary:

You can view it large on your computer and print it out here.

. Then, here are two worksheets for practicing the directions:

Vocab and page directions

You can download the activity here.