Learning, Living and Lots More in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” - Dr. Seuss

This picture is taken from one of our students’ writing samples. It shows good content, good development of the main ideas in the story. There are grammar mistakes, but these can be fixed easily. One of the reasons I picked this is because the content seems unusual and challenging.

As a children’s ESL teacher, I’ve long enjoyed making worksheets for students of all levels, using the main course book New Parade as a jumping off point. Over the years, though, I have refined some principles that still hold true to making a work sheet for students, especially younger learners.

This post has a downloadable: Learner’s A ~ Z Writing Worksheet

1. Use Bigger Clearer Fonts

Sounds obvious when you think about it, but younger learners and those learning Roman script for the first time can be easily confused by the curly g’s in New Times Roman, as well as the odd looking ‘a’ in New Times Roman. So for most of my worksheets, I do use Comic Sans MS as my standard. And the default point size is usually dependent students’ ages and ability. So for the youngest learners, I use 16 or even 18 points, and never less than 14 even for teenagers.

2. Lots of Space

Given the problems younger learners have with smaller fonts and sizes, I also balance the exercises by leaving as much space on each page as reasonably possible. Crowding can be confusing for the younger age groups, but also poor layout will make it less enjoyable and more frustrating for them.

3. Focus, Focus, Focus

It’s hard to produce good worksheets consistently, but one of the biggest problems is when you are at the computer, you often get carried away with the worksheets and produce 2 or even 3 pages where one would do. It’s best just to focus on one key point for the worksheet for the youngest learners, whether it is vocabulary or sentence practice. Also, worksheets need to avoid complexity in the set questions if they are to be successful. You can avoid complexity by restricting vocabulary and task type, while keeping exercises challenging enough to avoid repetition and boredom.

4. Learners in Asia

Never assume that learners are comfortable using Roman script! In fact, for many millions of learners Roman script is a whole new system of writing: for Russians, Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, … Many skills that are taught in the first language classroom in Europe, Americas and elsewhere really do transfer to ESL quite simply, so students there need less practise in spelling skills, for example. But in Asia, teachers need to teach the forms of writing, the phonics, and the spelling skills. These can’t be assumed, and when doing worksheets for younger learners, you need to remember this: make space for those learning letters for the first time (esp. those with poor pencil control), and provide guidelines showing where the letters need to be written.

5. Teach the worksheets before they go home!

For many learners, completing homework tasks in addition to school work can be an extra burden. But nothing makes that worse that unnecessary frustration caused by inability to complete the worksheet. Young learners tend to deal poorly with frustration, are less able to use external resources, and can easily become dependent learners if parents help with homework. So I’ve been going over worksheets before students go home at least orally to make sure that students know how to answer the questions in class. Additionally, if the worksheet is more repetitive in nature, then I usually let students write the first couple of answers so that I can see if they have problems.

I’m attaching a PDF for teachers to printout as a base writing sheet for the very youngest of learners in my classes.

A presentation by our students who wrote the script, directed the show, and made the set!

This was based on an item in our course text book, New Parade, the City Mouse and Country Mouse is a very traditional story that was taught originally in book 2. However, in Book 4 of Parade, students come back to the theme of story telling and put together their own version.

The brainstorming, writing, editing and production of the work was all done by the students with occasional input from the teachers. It took them quite a few weeks of work to put the show together.

But it shows what can be done with the right instruction, a little space, and lots of time!

Word Searches are a popular form of entertainment in Britain for adults. It’s pretty easy to use more limited vocabulary sets and create searches for ESL and EFL students.

But there’s a quicker way. With PuzzleMaker online.

So create your wordlist. Then you can go to the Puzzlemaker Website and paste your list.

The instructions are pretty clear on the page itself. But what I typically do with the results is paste them into a table in Word and create a complete worksheet itself. Once you make up the standard block in Word, it’s pretty easy to copy and paste the results into it.

I’ve included a sample Word Search created with this tool as a PDF http://www.hkjtefl.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/wordsearchfoodsweeat.pdf .