TeachingEnglish has lots of different activities for teachers who are teaching English around the world to children aged 5-12. To help you find suitable activities, we have three levels on our site. These activities for level 2 are most suitable for children who can understand and use words and sentences in common topics and situations, and can follow more complex stories and texts. Teachers can use the levels as a guide. For example, if they start to find level 2 activities too easy, you can try more level 3 activities. However, all children learn differently, so try activities from different levels at any time, especially if it is a topic they enjoy.

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Stop the bus

This is a great game to revise vocabulary and you can use it with any age group and any level by changing the category headings.

Gap fill gamble

This is a game to make any gap-fill task or cloze texts (reading tasks with gaps) more exciting.

The seasons

The seasons is a great topic for the beginning of the year as it marks the start of a fresh cycle.

My favourite day 1

This is the first in a two part series. Here you have a few ideas on how to review days of the week, months of the year and dates while allowing children to personalise the lesson and allowing you to give them some invaluable cultural input. 

Who does what? – YouTube technique

In this YouTube-based activity, students watch a scene from an animated film and observe the actions performed by characters. The activity is suitable for low level primary students since the focus here is not on listening.

People who help us

This is a topic which could be easily spread over several lessons by taking a different person, e.g. firefighter, per week as the focus. Below I have separated the tip into the various people who help us, suggesting activities that you could do about each of them. See if you can find storybooks to accompany at least a couple of the people.

Word building

There’s no problem in using and re-using methods that work as primary children need some sort of routine and approaches they are familiar with. However this shouldn’t lead to monotonous teaching and the same old pre-teaching with picture flashcards each lesson. Here we try to suggest some other ways to introduce vocabulary that will motivate and keep the children interested.

Mystery objects

This game is good for revising lexical sets and is useful for practising using adjectives. It can be teacher led or played as a team game.

All about me

With very young learners much of what they do in the classroom revolves around them. Before school they are often the centre of ‘their’ universe so starting school can sometimes be a bit of a shock.

Research and insight

Browse fascinating case studies, research papers, publications and books by researchers and ELT experts from around the world.

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