ESL Activities and Games | Teaching prepositions of place
Grammar | 60 - 90 minutes
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.
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Activities
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...
Games
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.