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

This ESL writing activity works better if you have done the lead-in activity on the board. 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?

This ESL writing activity mixes prepositions of place with bedroom vocabulary. 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

Individually or in pairs, students pick five items and write sentences that describe the bedroom on the board using the prepositions they have learned.

My room

For this activity, students will write about their bedroom using prepositions. 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.

Eye spy: Prepositions

This ESL game is a modified version of Eye Spy. On each turn, the ‘spy’ informs the other players that they are thinking of an object in the class. The other players have to guess by asking questions with prepositions:

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

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.