Taking Your ESL Lessons To The Next Level

In this section we'll take a look at ways that you can improve you basic lesson plan. These tips can help your good lessons become great lessons! These tips, by themselves, cannot make a lesson plan. You should always use the steps outlined in the previous section to build the foundation of you lesson plan, these tips are like the sizzle to the sausage!

There are several considerations to take into account when developing you lesson content. Here are the main things that you should consider:
• Age - how old are your students? Are your activities appropriate for the age that you are teaching?
• Ability/level - what do you students already know? Are you building a foundation of knowledge of just teaching a bit from here and there?
• Classroom environment - what resources are available to you? How many students are there? How big is the classroom? Can you take the students outside if you need to?
• Sensitive topics - be aware that you are teaching to students from a different culture to you own (usually) and they may have different values and beliefs.

Why use games? I've mentioned using games a fair bit in this article, besides being fun, why is it a good idea to use games?
• They provide a lot a language repetition.
• They help to consolidate language points/vocabulary

However, not all games are good for all classes, when choosing games you should consider:
• Age/level appropriateness - will the students be able to understand the game or even enjoy it?
• Safety - don't risk your student's safety for the sake of a fun lesson.
• Number of students - some games only work with a certain number of students.

Does it flow?
• The whole point of a lesson plan is so that at any point in your lesson you can quickly glance at where you're up to and what's coming up next. If you can't make sense of it, then you've wasted your time planning a worthless lesson plan and possibly the student's time because you may have missed something from your lesson.
• Lesson plans take the guess work out of calculating the length of your lessons. This allows you to include as much of the content as you had intended.

Why should you use worksheets in the classroom?
• Worksheets help to consolidate learning as well as providing an opportunity for student to student interactivity.
• They can also help you gauge how well a student is doing as you never know what kind of “help” they've received at home with their homework.

This article has seen use learn why we should develop ESL lesson plans, the core structure of a lesson plan, as well as tips to help you make your lessons great. This is only the beginning, in the next section we will reveal a bunch of resources for you to use when creating new lessons.

Enjoy!