EFL - ESL activities and games for teaching prepositions of place

An ESL lesson plan for teaching prepositions of place to beginners. It contains a lead-in activity along with some fun ESL activities and games. If you need to bring these materials into the classroom for reference, the TEFL Handbook app gives you offline access to all of the ESL resources on this site, plus a lot more.

Lead-in activity

The sample board below illustrates one way that you could introduce or review prepositions of place. As the board implies, step through each preposition and use images to elicit them from the students.

ESL activities for prepositions of place

Preposition sentences

In this writing activity, the students will create phrases that describe images on the board. 

This activity works better if you have done the board work for the lesson. If you have used the sample board, have your students make five sentences that describe the images. If not, they can write about different objects in the classroom.

Where is everything?

Students will write sentences that describe a typical bedroom. 

Start by drawing a simple bedroom on the board. It should contain the traditional bedroom furniture and objects. Elicit as many of these as possible and add labels to the drawing: 

Bed 
Wardrobe 
Wall 
Shelf 
Bedside table 
Desk 
Chest of drawers 
Books 
TV 
Mirror 
Lamp 
Curtains 

When you have finished your drawing, have the students select five objects and write sentences about them using the prepositions they have learned.

My room

For this activity, students will use the target language of the lesson to write a description of their bedroom. 

Before they begin, you could write a description of your bedroom on the board to help them get started. 

In my bedroom, there's a bed next to the wall. 
There are books on the shelf...

ESL games

Here is one idea for a game that English teachers can use to teach prepositions of place. As usual, we only include game ideas that require no more than a whiteboard, markers and a dice.

20 Questions: Prepositions of place

Students use questions containing prepositions to identify an item in the room that their classmate is thinking of. 

You might want to demo this first, so start by selecting a student at random and ask them to think of an arbitrary object in the classroom. They must know the English for that word. You'll now ask the student questions until you guess the item correctly. A dialogue might look like the following: 

Teacher: Is it behind me? 
Student B: No, it isn't 
Teacher: Is it next to the boxes? 
Student B: Yes, it is. 
Teacher: Is it the radio? 
Student B: Yes, it is. 

When the students understand how the game works, they can play themselves. The player who guesses correctly thinks of the next item.

More ESL lesson plans for beginners

We hope that you were able to grab a few ideas from this lesson plan. Our suggested next lesson is on using There's/are. Be sure to check out our full list of ESL lesson plans for beginners (A1 Upper), as well as the complete collection. Also, if you are an iOS or Android user, the best way to view this content is through the TEFL Handbook app. An ESL lesson planner for English teachers, designed for in-class use.