Wanna know about a cool tool to do writing for ESL students? It’s flip books! I think it’s important for students to practice writing as a whole instead of just the components of language like grammar and vocabulary. Writing is a communicative skill and this is what we use language for. So, I want my students to write pieces of text as often as possible. Not only will that tell me about their writing skills up to this point, but it will also show their progress in things like capitalization and punctuation and paragraphing skills.
I love using journals for this purpose, and I keep those journals in my classroom. I use these because then students can see their own progress over time as well, and, of course, so can I. But I also love flip books because they are so cute! Let me tell you why I think flip books are such a fun tool to use for teaching writing for ESL students.
Need some help coming up with ESL writing topics? Grab this free Topic Picker Cheat Sheet to help you choose what to have your students write about! Click here to get it!
Writing ESL activities
I believe that in order to learn a language well, students need to have a lot of practice with their language skills. In the case of writing, ESL exercises should be as low pressure as possible, obviously not for a grade, and they should be about familiar topics. When you are teaching writing to ESL students, spend a little bit of time on the mechanics, and just a lot of time on just doing it, without being critiqued in any way. One way to make it fun is using flip books!
Writing prompts ESL students will love
Flipbooks are super fun for a couple of reasons.
- They take an element of movement to do, because you have to flip the pages to open the book, and students have to turn pages to get to the next prompt.
- It’s fun to have all the prompts that belong together in the same place in the form of a little book. This way, you can ask students lots about the same topic and they get to elaborate a bit.
- Flip books, make for cute gifts as well. You could have one for Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day, and Teacher Appreciation Day is a fun occasion too.
So if you’re looking for writing practice ESL students will love, consider flip books! You can probably find a template to make them yourself, but I also have a bunch of them up in my store, if you want to check those out. Click here to check out a whole bundle of them, or below to have a look at each separate one, for:
- Mother’s Day
- Father’s Day
- Teacher Appreciation Day
- All About Me for Back to School
- Valentine’s Day
- New Year’s Resolutions
- World Book Day – Book Reflections
Have fun trying flip books for yourself!
Related articles:
How to get super fun prompt words for writing with story dice
Why roll-the-dice sheets can work wonder for creative writing with your students
