Tip

Students should submit their photos anonymously to avoid the social media ‘we like sheep’ phenomenon, where you ‘like’ the picture taken by your mate even if it’s a load of rubbish because if you don’t, they will never speak to you again!

Origami instructions

How about giving students instructions in English to do some origami? Students can each make a different model and show it in the following online class. They could have the task then of creating a story, collectively, that involves each of the items made. Or, each student makes up a story with his or her origami object as the hero/heroine.

Grow or make things

Ongoing projects that students share with the class could be to plant lettuce seeds in a pot at home. Even if there isn’t much space at home or in class, you can still grow lettuce by a window in a salad bowl. It’s also therapeutic to grow things. Of course, some students may not be able to do this, in which case, let them choose another project to create and share.

Dressing up project

How about a dressing-up project? Each student creates an outfit, from their regular clothes, with some makeup and a prop or two. They attend class in their costume (if you use cameras) or send in a picture. Everyone guesses who the others are. Students can then present their character and say a few lines about them, who they are, why they like them, what they have done that is significant. It can be anything – give students free rein. If someone wants to disguise themselves as their cat, why not? They can still tell you why they chose their pet and what they like about it.

Personally, I would be useless at this disguise task, and I would not even enjoy doing it. But, on the other hand, doing something like the Armenian artist Edgar Artis would appeal more to me. He is into making dresses with everyday objects from salad to matches. So it’s crucial to give your students a choice of activity.

(Get ideas from Edgar Artis’ Instagram page)

Plays and skits

Reading scripts in small groups or one on one can be an excellent activity. It might be too much of a drag with a large class unless you can do group work online. That said, some fun could be had with pronunciation practise, and putting expression into speech. Working on expression is brilliant for speaking fluency and confidence too. So, take a couple of lines from a play and have students put as much energy and feeling into the lines as they can. Explore different ways that the lines can be said, such as disdain, questioning, joy, laughter, hesitancy, and sadness. Try emphasizing certain words in the sentence and see how it affects the meaning. A single comma often transforms meaning. For example, let’s eat, Grandpa. Or, let’s eat Grandpa!

Check out my book of skits for teens here.

Science experiments students can do at home.

There are plenty of sites online for ideas, like Science Bob, which looks good.

Demonstrate in class and have students try the experiment at home for homework, then share any photos or film and results in the next lesson.

Sketching.

Give students a vocabulary list to choose from, sketch one word, and then share results. First, have the most talented sketcher show the others how to draw a specific object. If you do this for five minutes in each lesson, students will get better at sketching. You can find lots of great ‘how to draw’ methods free online. In the same vein, try Bob McKim’s 30 Circles Test (McKim was a Standford University Researcher.) Students draw 30 circles and then take five minutes to turn those circles into anything their imagination allows.

Then do this activity again with another shape, for instance, triangles or rectangles. Students compare items drawn and ideas. Make it a cooperative or team game, with students working together to develop the most pictures. You can cover a lot of vocabulary like this, and if you want to get more English into it, have students do a flash-fiction activity by making up a concise story with ten items drawn in their 30 circles. Again, the more you do it, the better you get.

Conclusion

Of course, worksheets are an easy option when teaching English online, and can be super useful. But in this blog post, I tried to think of some more creative ideas, to get students involved in learning English in a more personal way. As you use more creative ideas, your students WILL become better at it. So do persevere, even if, at first, everyone seems pretty shy.

Answer to the close-ups: Tyre, tangerine, rose, and bread.