Tag: christmas

Children love Christmas.

And they love speaking about it.

Here you will find a set of materials to help them speak in English.

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Christmas is coming and it is always a good idea to have several Christmas activities up your sleeve. Here are the things I love to do when I teach the Christmas lesson.

There are many different Christmas songs. I always play three or four traditional English carols, but I always prepare an original song the students have never heard before. This year I have prepared the following song.
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I ask my students to listen and complete the following lyrics:
Christmas time song
If you are looking for more Christmas songs, there is a nice one on British Council page.

Once I we are over the song I love to present Christmas in Great Britain. I use the following mind map.

I print out the mind map and then I display it on the IWB. I start from the top and explain that 24th December is called Christmas eve and that people in Britain and America get ready for the Christmas day. I present each vocabulary item and explain it to my students or elicit their knowledge.
I go like this till the 26th December.
Once you have presented the vocabulary, you can test your students’ knowledge in the following game:

Christmas vocabulary quiz

Of course it is great if students can speak about the British or American Christmas traditions but the foreigners are always interested in your own traditions. That is why it is necessary to be able to speak about the local traditions.
As I teach in the Czech Republic, I have prepared a short text about the Czech traditions. You can find the text, recording and several quizzes over here:

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Czech Christmas traditions

Would you like to download the song and use it in offline? As we cannot distribute more than 10,000 copies you have to complete the following form and we will send the video and MP3 file ASAP.
Please note, that you cannot distribute the song further!!!

So, merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Christmas is nearly over, but when the holiday ends I would like my students to tell me about their Christmas. To be able to do this properly they will need a lot of Christmas vocabulary. Here is a mind map introducing all the key words and concepts connected with Christmas in Great Britain and the USA. Go through all the words and content and then play the game to practise the Christmas vocabulary.

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Christmas Vocabulary game

Once you know the vocabulary it is time to practise it. Here is a simple quiz where you should fill in the names of the things you see in the pictures. If you get more than 80% of all the answers correct you can play a game called Indiara. Good luck.

Christmas Vocabulary quiz

Christmas Traditions – listening

I come from the Czech Republic and I have prepared a short text describing the unusual traditions connected with Christmas here. You can listen to the recording and then play a comprehension game. To make the listening easier for you, you can listen and read the text at the same time. This kind of listening is very good for your pronunciation too, as you can read along.

Listen and read
Comprehension game – Hoopshoot.

If you feel that you need more listening practice, try the following dictation exercises. Listen to the recording and then fill in the missing words. You can stop the recording whenever you like and play different parts again. In this way your listening comprehension will improve.

Czech Christmas Customs Dictation – elementary
Czech Christmas Customs Dictation – pre-intermediate
Czech Christmas Customs Dictation – intermediate

I hope you will find all these resources useful.
Merry Christmas.

More Games to learn English

If you like these exercises there are many more games to learn English at this site. We recommend the following ones:
Past tense of the irregular verbs – this post contains a mind map and several highly addictive games to learn the English irregular verbs in the past tense.
And what about present perfect tense? Is it still a mystery for you? Try the following post on Present perfect tense.