Task esol journaling Activities

Task 1.

ESOL Journaling Activities

Are you ready to give regular journaling with your ESL students and clients a try? Here are a few ideas I can implement:

1. Encourage your students to use their ESL journal like a diary. They may write down their routines and personal observations each day.

2. Students can use their journal as a way to record their goals (for language learning or for other areas of their life) and the specific actions they will use to achieve them.

3. Encourage true freewriting, in which students write about the first thoughts or ideas that come to their mind.

4. Have students recall an incident or situation that held significance for them.

5. Google “writing prompts” and choose three that you can share with your students. Always offer options if you are giving prompts. Once again, the writing must be personally relevant to the student for it to engage the key components of the learning brain.

Task 2.

The activity:

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  Tell students that they should keep a journal.
  
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  Tell them that they are free to write about whatever they want.
  
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  They should not care about the length of their production. Their writing may be one sentence long :)!  or it may enclose a number of paragraphs.
  

Prompts:

Sometimes students get lost about what they may write about. It would be wise to give them ideas to help them get started. Here are some prompt ideas:

Telling about oneself
What happened on my way to school
What I did last night / last weekend
What I am doing tonight /or next weekend
The funniest thing I ever saw was…
Let me tell you about…
I like to …for many reasons.
I know how to …. First…
I just learned facts about…
Let me tell you about…
It’s fun to …. First you…
Many changes happen to …as they grow.
Let me tell you about my dream school…
Let me tell you about my dream teacher…
These are the things I would like to change about myself.
What I really enjoy doing.
What really bothers me
What really excites me
Fantasizing
My pet turned into a monster….
I woke up this morning the size of a mouse…
I woke up one morning and everything was strange…
My pet talked to me …
My dog thinks he is an artist
My friend the giant
My talking pen told me…
My magic car…
Suddenly I was invisible…
The day my dog wore a jacket…
The day I became a cloud…
The day I flew…
The day I became an angel/ a dentist/singer / artist…
The day I met Robin hood…
The night the Martians landed…