5 Lesson Plan Ideas for First-Time Teachers Abroad

For first-time teachers abroad, standing in front of a class of noisy youngsters or tired teenagers can seem like a daunting prospect. This is especially the case if you haven’t mastered the art of lesson planning in the ESL classroom.

Whether or not your curriculum includes the exact topics presented in this article, you can still benefit from these inspirational lesson plans. Read on to discover 5 lesson plan ideas for first-time teachers abroad!

In most educational settings, teachers need to follow a set curriculum that includes key topics and learning goals students should master by the end of the year. Lesson planning will help you prepare and overcome learning obstacles in the classroom.

• Understand what you’re teaching: As Benjamin Franklin (and also Taylor Swift) said, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Lesson planning helps you understand what you’re teaching and how to structure the lesson for learners. Additionally, some ideas or points are difficult to convey. Not all English speakers can teach - or even explain - the present perfect continuous, for example.
• Cater to various levels: While you’ll teach classrooms by grade, English levels will vary within that classroom. Lesson planning will help you cater to a specific level, but also adjust and adapt the content for students who find it too difficult (or too easy!).
• Address learning styles: Learning styles include auditory, visual, kinesthetic/tactile, and reading & writing. Lesson plans can help you address each of these learning styles in the classroom.

Read more: How to Improve Your Classroom Management: A Beginner's Guide

Consider splitting the lesson into three sections. You can use this template for most lesson topics!

• Introduction / warmer: This introduces a subject or topic engagingly. Rather than saying “get your books out”, consider using a quick game, activity, or video to pique their interest before presenting the information in more detail. Popular examples include “shark attack” or hangman, word scramble/jumble, board race, and other quick but engaging games!
• Presentation: Present the target language points in more detail to your students. This is the more theoretical aspect of the lesson, but you can use games during this activity to keep it interesting. Provide examples and model the vocabulary or grammar point you want the students to be able to produce.
• Production: In the final third of the lesson, let the students use these target language points with more independence. As long as they understand the concept through explanation, examples, and guidance, they should be able to produce this information independently. This can include reading & writing tasks, projects (poster or presentation) and so on.
• Review: If you have time, you can review the key language points for 5 minutes to close out the class period.

Read more: 10 Fun ESL Games and Activities for Teaching Kids English Abroad

✨ Skills practiced: Conversational English, interview questions, presentation, introducing oneself
🏫 Who it's best for: Pre-intermediate to advanced (A2 to C1)
✏️ Materials needed: Powerpoint, whiteboard, flag, map, photos of friends/family/your city, sentimental items

A large part of the reason why your current employer hired you to teach abroad is because of your unique background. Your role isn’t only to teach the curriculum but also to share your culture with your students.
When you arrive at your new school, your students will be intrigued by you and they’ll want to get to know you. Having a foreign teacher is a novelty for them!

• Introduction: Play a game of “shark attack” - a variation of hangman - with your name. Draw a stickman with a parachute that has 8 cords, a menacing shark in the sea, and lines for each letter in your name. Let students guess a letter one at a time to find out your name. If they’re wrong, remove one of the parachute lines! Not only do the visuals of the shark and the parachute grasp student’s attention, the potential of losing keeps them on edge!
• Presentation: After a brief introduction, you can present a quiz for your age, nationality, and interests. Use a presentation to share pictures of your home country, travels, pets, and so on. You can incorporate questions in the slides to make it quiz based! This is a great opportunity to encourage students to think of conversation starters and questions they would typically ask someone they meet for the first time.
• Production: At the end of class and for the next class, you can continue this theme by encouraging students to make a poster introducing themselves to you and the class. You can also assign them homework to bring a photo of their family, house, pet, or anything related to their personality or interests. This will help you personalize future lessons for your students!

✨ Skills practiced: Listening comprehension, reading comprehension, creative writing
🏫 Who it's best for: Low intermediate to upper intermediate (B1 to B2)
✏️ Materials needed: Lyrics sheet, speakers

The more you teach, the more you realize that students love to sing. Music is not only beloved by adults and children alike but it is also shown to help boost memory.

When incorporating music into your lesson plan, you’re making learning the target language fun and engaging. Personalize your lessons with K-pop, Hip-Hop, Taylor Swift, or whichever genre or artist your students love to make it even more appealing to them!

• Introduction: Introduce the subject of music by showing a video of a popular performance, you can choose an age appropriate song by adapting the genre, performer, and theme based on the age or level that you’re teaching.
• Presentation: Create a mindmap involving key vocabulary words (e.g. play, sing, dance, guitar, drums, rock, rap) related to music and performance. Display song lyrics on the whiteboard projector and ask students to write down as many words related to the target language vocabulary (music-related words, nouns, adjectives, etc.) that they can see in the song.
• Production: Provide students with a lyrics sheet for a song and remove keywords from the lyrics. These can be verbs, nouns, adjectives, or anything else! Then, have students listen to the song and fill in the blanks of the missing words! After they’ve completed the activity, you can play the song and pause at certain points for students to sing the rest of the lyrics!

✨ Skills practiced: Reading comprehension, researching, English presentation, communication
🏫 Who it's best for: Intermediate to low advanced (B1 to C1)
✏️ Materials needed: A3 paper sheets, crafts, coloring pens

In the age of climate anxiety, it’s important to teach future generations about environmental issues. Examining real-life problems within the English learning environment makes for a great lesson for students because it improves their world knowledge in addition to their language abilities.

Because this is a project-based lesson, you can potentially carry this over a few classes to ensure that your students have enough time. For their homework, they can find additional facts and figures and print or make images.

Whether students come up with an instrument that turns plastic into fish food or design the first cycle-only city, allow them to exercise their independence and creativity!

• Introduction: Show a quick video about climate issues, and create a mindmap to elicit some information about issues that the environment faces. Categorize mindmaps into environments (e.g. the ocean, air, forest) or issues (e.g. air pollution, sea pollution) to help students expand their vocabulary.
• Presentation: Present the key facts and ideas about issues concerning the environment. Make sure that you present sentence structures and key vocabulary for students to learn. Come up with solutions to issues, and form a sentence involving the problem, causes, and solution.
• Production: Students get into groups to create a poster and presentation on their key focus. They can focus on reducing plastic pollution, rising sea levels, carbon emissions, deforestation, protecting animals, and other environmental issues. Have them then create new (real or fictional) contraptions that can help solve their chosen climate dilemma. Groups will present their problem and solution to the class..

✨ Skills practiced: Listening comprehension, visual comprehension
🏫 Who it's best for: Beginner (A1 to A2)
✏️ Materials needed: Paper, pens, colored crayons, markers

“Draw along” can be a fantastic way to help beginner to intermediate students remember vocabulary and improve their listening comprehension. While this example focuses on parts of the body, this can be done with a range of subjects such as objects, cities, vehicles, and animals.

Gestures and physical movement (or TPR) will make this activity easier for those who are struggling with listening comprehension, or it will simply remind them and help them memorize key vocabulary words.

At the end of the lesson, compare everyone’s monsters and you can praise not only their listening comprehension but also their creativity! Although everyone heard the same description, you’ll see very different monsters!

• Introduction: Play Simon Says, with emphasis on body parts. You can say “Simon Says (or “teacher says”) touch your nose/arm/leg,” and don’t forget silly fun movements like jumping and dancing!
• Presentation: Introduce and review vocabulary words with flashcards, whether the words are arms, nose, legs, head, face, ears, and so on. Use flashcards or write on the board to use games such as slap the board to help students practice these words.
• Production: Tell the students that they will draw a monster, following your step-by-step description. Slowly describe the monster, "2 green heads", "4 purple arms", “big teeth”, and so on. Use as many prompts as you can by saying the color, showing the color, and also tapping the body parts mentioned to reinforce their memorization.

✨ Skills practiced: Critical thinking, presentation, communication
🏫 Who it's best for: Beginner (A1 to A2)
✏️ Materials needed: A3 paper, arts & crafts materials (glue, tape, scissors, colored markers, crayons)

This lesson helps students practice vocabulary words and concepts regarding cities and urban living. With beginners, you can do this with easier buildings such as house, bank, cinema, and so on, whereas you can use advanced vocabulary words with advanced students.

• Introduction: This game is called board race! Divide the class into teams, and create a column on the board for each team. Give each team one pen, and tell the first person in line to write one building or facility in a city or town as fast as they can. They’ll then pass the pen to the next student to write another. Give them 1 or 2 minutes to see how many words they can come up with. When time is up, give each team a point per word. The team with the most points wins!
• Presentation: Introduce additional city vocabulary like park, hospital, gym, restaurant, cinema, and more. Elicit more information and ask students to use a structured dialogue such as “why do you go to the ____?” and “I go to the [cinema] to [watch movies].” Have students complete the dialogues and demonstrate to the rest of the class.
• Production: Students get into groups to create a city of their own. If you want to branch this topic to the next lesson, each student can bring a cereal box, milk carton, or other paper objects from home and be assigned a specific building, as well as scissors, markers, and colored paper to draw the city layout. They can use their recycled objects and creative skills to create a model of their city. By the end of the project, students can give the classroom a tour of their model city.

In your ESL classroom, you’re likely to find a wide range of language abilities. Some students will be very advanced while others may struggle with basic concepts. Learning how to adapt, or differentiate, your lessons will help you teach a class catering to different levels.

Using differentiation, you can also take one general lesson plan and use it across a range of classrooms if you teach several grade levels. If you have this flexibility, it will save you a lot of time!

Some of the best ways for adapting your lessons include:

• Prompting: Make sure to use prompts, such as body language (pointing), flashcards, props, and to give students an extra push. Students may know the answer but need the time - or guidance - to find it. Younger students often benefit most from prompting.
• Subject matter: Teaching different grades or ages doesn’t mean that you have to discard a whole lesson plan. You can adjust the content to cater to different ages or levels. In a music themed lesson, you can use Disney songs with younger students, and pop songs with older students.
• Level of production: The production stage is where students will independently demonstrate what they have learned, so it’s doubly important that this stage is adaptable. Beginners and younger students may only be able to use and repeat single words or short sentences, whereas more advanced students can articulate their thoughts through debates and presentations.

There are a range of free games and lesson planning resources out there that can help you plan your lessons. Teachers are a generous bunch! Many share their most successful lesson plans online for others to use.

Consider using the resources for lesson planning inspiration:

• iSL Collective
• EngWorksheets
• Lyrics training
• ESL Games Plus
• British Council

Teaching abroad requires not only organization but also improvisation and adaptability. As you accumulate more experience, you can easily create lesson plans from scratch, especially as you get to know your students.

As a beginner teacher, it’s important to lean on experienced educators (hint, hint: your co-workers and Go Overseas!). Their ideas will provide you with inspiration for in-class activities and topics that will engage your student while developing their English language abilities and help you grow as a teacher – all at the same time!

Read more about teaching English abroad:

• 8 Solutions to Teaching With Limited Classroom Resources
• How to Improve Your Classroom Management: A Beginner's Guide
• 10 Fun ESL Games and Activities for Teaching Kids English Abroad