good english homework

10 entertaining homework ideas for online English Language Learners

Did hearing the words, “do your homework,” when you were a child excite you?

For most of us, the word homework doesn’t conjure up exciting or fun memories.

Homework was likely one of the last things you wanted to do as a student!

However, what if you could make homework fun for students? What if homework was entertaining?

In this article, we share some entertaining homework ideas for English language learners to help them improve their English while having fun!

You might be familiar with lots of ESL games and activities for your students , but assigning the right homework can feel overwhelming.

This is particularly true if you don’t want to burden your students with a tremendous amount of information.

Have you ever thought about combining games with homework?

There are many alternative ways to create memorable lessons, such as incorporating karaoke songs to learn English.

Here are 10 fun and entertaining homework ideas for your ESL students:

Cafe hopper
Tiktok star
Let’s go to the movies
Hello Mr. Teacher
Interview a stranger
Shine like a Karaoke star
Expert on the loose
24 hour challenge
It’s a wrap!
Masterchef in the making

1. Cafe hopper

Most people love checking out cafes and this is an easy homework task to assign to your students.

Have your students visit a variety of cafes as part of their homework.

Then, consider what they could do for homework in a cafe of their choice.

Here are some fun ideas for turning cafe-hopping into homework:

Practice ordering in English off of the menu.
Take a photo of the cafe’s and share the differences and similarities with you in class.
Speak to a stranger in each cafe in English and ask them some interesting questions about their life.
Interview the barista about their favorite kind of coffee or beverage.

This is a stress-free homework idea that your students will love, especially if they are coffee or tea lovers!

2. TikTok star

Tiktok is a fun social media application where you can watch videos and songs from creators. You can also watch creators lip-synching to catchy tunes.

Show some fun examples in your class of some famous TikTok songs being lip-synched to by others and practice doing one together.

For homework, have them choose their favorite song on TikTok.
They can lip-synch to the song and download the song to their camera album without having to actually post it to TikTok.
Have them share their creation with you in the next class!

Depending on the age and location of your student, TikTok might not be an option for them. If you are teaching older students or adults , then it might be easier for them to use social media for this homework assignment rather than young children.

If they are too young to use the app, have them find an online video of their favorite song and ask a parent to record them singing!

3. Let’s go to the movies

Going to the movies doesn’t sound like homework, does it? Well, as you might already be discovering, homework doesn’t have to be conventional!

Find some interesting movies that are playing in your students’ area or ask them to watch a movie of their choice in English.

Tell them that their homework is going to be based on the movie they watch.

Here are some ideas for making going to the movies part of their homework:

Have them write a summary of the movie or their favorite part.
Tell them that they have to give you a movie review in your next class.
Have them act out their favorite part of the movie with a sibling or family member and record it (in English of course!).
Ask them to make a poster advertising the movie with captions, titles and text to accompany any drawings.

If you are struggling to find movies they can go and watch in the cinema, you can always use these ESL movies and TV shows as a resource.

Students can also watch movies from the comforts of their homes.

4. Hello Mr. Teacher!

Students love playing the role of the teacher!

This can work for in-person or online ESL classes.

Tell them that as part of the next classroom activity, the first 5 – 10 minutes will be their time to shine as the teacher!

For homework, ask them to:

Think of one topic that they know a lot about (This could be a sport, musical instrument, game, topic, etc…).
Have them prepare 5 important things that someone needs to know about their topic.
Tell them that in their next class they will be the teacher and share their knowledge! (They can even give you homework!).

Have fun with this homework idea and role-play the student where you ask them questions after they finish.

Your students will love this one!

5. Interview a stranger

This one might need some parent support and guidance if you are teaching children, but having them interview someone is an entertaining homework idea for English language learners.

It encourages their own voice as they come up with ideas.
It helps with writing skills as they write out their questions.
Interviewing encourages conversation and role playing which is a fun way to learn English.

You could have your younger students interview a family member and ask questions related to that family member’s childhood.

Here are some sample questions you could help your students form:

What kind of things did you like to do when you were my age?
What was your favorite thing about school?
What types of sports did you play when you were young?
Tell me about what life was like when you were a child.

Have them choose and write out 5-10 questions and come back to class to report on their findings!

6. Shine like a Karaoke star

Who doesn’t like a bit of karaoke? Imagine….singing your heart out to “I love rock n roll” in the privacy of your own home!

You don’t need to go to a karaoke place to actually sing karaoke songs. There are lots of great karaoke songs available online to learn English with your students.

YouTube is a great place to start, just by searching for your favorite song + “karaoke lyrics” in the search bar.

In class, help your student(s) choose a song and task them with finding the online karaoke lyrics to sing along.

Have them sing this for homework! You could even ask a parent to help them record it if they are comfortable with that.

Here are some fun and popular karaoke songs online to learn English:

“I Will Survive” with Gloria Gaynor
“Livin’ on a Prayer” with Bon Jovi
“Summer Nights” with John Travolta and Olivia Newton John
“Don’t Stop Believin’” with Journey

7. Expert on the loose

There is an expert in all of us, including your students!

In this fun and entertaining homework idea, have your student share their expertise on something!

To add a different dimension to the homework idea, “Hello Mr. Teacher,” task your students to dress up as the expert and make a short speech on their topic of choice.

Here are some examples:

Harry Potter
Michael Jordan (to talk about basketball)
Favorite sports athlete
Insect scientist
Astronaut (if your student knows a lot about space)
Presidential candidate
Pilot (for students who know a lot about countries)

Even if they are not an expert on the topic, part of the homework assignment could be to do some research and learn more about their chosen field.

You could even ask them to dress up and come to class in the role, ready to share their knowledge with you!

8. 24 hour English challenge

This one is self-explanatory and incredibly fun!

Set a challenge for your student to only speak in English for 24 hours.

This means that you might need to get parents involved with the homework assignment, so that they can help out.

The idea is that they have to speak only in English (as much as is possible given their situation) when interacting with family, friends and at school.

Your students might already be immersed in English environments, but, oftentimes, they are speaking their native language at home with family and friends.

Having your students force themselves to only speak in English is challenging and a great way to encourage English outside the classroom.

9. It’s a wrap!

Lots of students love to rap! Rap music is poetic and encourages a lot of ESL language skills that we want to build in our students.

This is an activity that you can model with your students in class and assign it for homework for them to create their own rap.

Again, they can come back to class and rap their new song to you! It might, however, work better with older students who have a good base level of English, to begin with.

Here are some fun homework assignments incorporating rap:

Create their own rap if they are the creative type
Find a well known rap online and practice it to present in class
Assign your students to find a rap online that they sing and record with their friends

10. Masterchef extraordinaire

For the food lovers, creating a homework assignment that includes cooking can be really fun.

Most kids love the idea of cooking, especially if it centers around cooking their favorite food!

When considering this as a homework idea, consider these possible assignments:

Create and write out a recipe for a unique culinary dish.
Make a video about the cooking experience.
Record a tutorial of how to cook something.
Turn it into a competition if you have multiple students.

Plus, this works with physical and online classrooms.

Of course, if you have a physical classroom with multiple students, this could be a really fun in-class experience with some homework assignments to accompany it.

Who doesn’t love a food-related assignment?

If you choose Masterchef extraordinaire, allow your students to share the food they make with the class and encourage lots of conversations in English.

Homework doesn’t have to be boring!

As you can see, homework doesn’t have to be boring!

Most of your ESL students have a lot to do even outside class, and that’s why assigning homework that doesn’t feel like homework is ideal!

This is an opportunity to get creative, creating excitement for your students to learn English.

If you use some of the homework ideas mentioned here, make sure you document the experience and continue to discover new activities that bring laughter and joy to the classroom.

And when you are applying to online teaching jobs , be sure to share how you plan to creatively incorporate class assignments and homework for your students!

Enjoy the process and make learning an enjoyable experience for everyone.

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Homework for ESL Students – 10 Ideas for Teachers

Meet David De’ Ath , founder, editor, and writer at Wonderful World English. With his extensive background as an English teacher, David provides valuable insights and practical tips on ESL for students and teachers alike.

Learning English as a Second Language (ESL) is an enriching venture and offers students the ability to access global opportunities.

Homework in ESL is crucial, serving as a bridge between classroom theory and practical language use.

It’s essential for reinforcing learned concepts and enhancing general language proficiency.

To make this learning journey both effective and enjoyable, it’s important to craft homework tasks that are engaging and tailored to diverse learning styles.

This approach helps to maintain students’ interest and motivation, which are key to successful language acquisition.

These ESL homework ideas are designed to enhance language learning and engage students both in and out of the classroom: Daily journaling, vocabulary flashcards, reading comprehension, listening to podcasts/songs, video diaries, role-play scenarios, grammar worksheets, online games, book club discussions, and a pen pal program.

I am an experienced ESL teacher, and I can attest first-hand to the importance of self-study, homework, and review.

Our carefully selected ten homework ideas aim to transform routine learning into an exciting adventure.

These activities are more than just assignments; they’re interactive experiences designed to deepen students’ understanding of English.

From creative writing to practical exercises, these tasks are intended to make learning English a dynamic and enjoyable process, paving the way for a richer, more confident use of the language.

Homework Ideas for ESL Students

ESL students need more than just traditional classroom lessons.

Homework is a vital part of their language development and serves as a bridge between acquired knowledge and practical application.

The following homework ideas are designed to captivate students’ interest, deepen their understanding, and enhance their fluency in English in the classroom and real-life situations.

Let’s dive into these creative and effective homework strategies that promise a richer, more interactive language learning experience:

1. Daily Journaling

This is a great idea to engage students by embracing the habit of maintaining a daily journal.

Writing about their daily experiences, emotions, thoughts, or selected topics can sharpen their writing skills while learning to articulate their feelings and ideas in English.

This journaling process serves a dual purpose: it strengthens their grasp of the language and provides a personal space for self-expression.

As they regularly engage with this practice, English becomes an integral part of their daily routine and will facilitate a more natural and fluent use of the language in their everyday lives.

This activity bolsters their linguistic abilities and fosters a deeper connection with English as a medium of personal reflection and expression.

Writing is a huge aspect of mastering a language.

For a guide on how to improve writing skills for yourself or your students, click the link below!

Related Article: How to Sharpen Writing Skills – Full Guide

2. Making Flashcards

Students can develop their vocabulary skills through the classic and effective method of creating flashcards.

This exercise involves students writing down new words and their meanings on individual cards.

They can add illustrations or use words in sentences to make the learning process more engaging and impactful.

This visual and contextual approach helps better retain and understand new vocabulary.

By regularly reviewing these flashcards, students can gradually build a robust vocabulary base, which is essential for fluency in English.

This method will reinforce their word knowledge and encourage active engagement with the language, making vocabulary learning a more interactive and enjoyable experience.

Flashcards are suitable for students of all ages and can be fun.

For some great insights on effectively teaching ESL students vocabulary, the guide below is for you!

Related Article: How to Teach Vocabulary to ESL Students – The Guide

3. Reading Comprehension Exercises

Immerse more advanced students in the world of English reading by assigning short stories or articles complemented by comprehension questions.

This exercise is pivotal in enhancing their reading skills and deepening their understanding of various contexts in English.

Students encounter different writing styles, vocabularies, and themes by engaging with diverse texts, enriching their language experience.

The follow-up questions serve to test their understanding and encourage critical thinking about the content.

This approach bolsters their ability to comprehend English texts and stimulates their analytical skills, making them more adept at interpreting and engaging with the language in its written form.

Such reading exercises are fundamental in helping students gain confidence and proficiency in navigating English literature and media.

4. Podcasts and Songs

Teachers can offer listening exercises in their curriculums by using English podcasts and songs.

This method exposes students to a variety of accents, speaking speeds, and vocabulary in a natural context.

After listening, students can engage in activities like writing summaries or answering questions about what they heard.

These post-listening tasks are crucial for enhancing their comprehension and retention.

This approach is great at improving listening skills while making the learning process more enjoyable and relatable.

By regularly interacting with authentic English content, students develop a better ear for the language and learn to appreciate its rhythm and nuances in different forms of media.

This not only aids in language acquisition but also connects them culturally to the English-speaking world.

Check out the guide below for a list of the BEST English podcasts!

Related Article: Best Podcasts to Learn the English Language in 2024 (Top 10)

5. Video Diaries

This one encourages students to create short video diaries as a regular assignment.

This task provides them with a platform to practice speaking about a variety of topics in English.

Whether they choose to talk about their daily life, share opinions on current events, or discuss their hobbies, these video diaries offer a unique opportunity for students to engage actively with the language.

This activity not only improves their spoken English skills but also significantly boosts their confidence in using the language.

It helps them to overcome any hesitation or fear of speaking by providing a safe, personal space to express themselves.

The process of recording and watching their own videos can also be a powerful tool for self-evaluation and progress tracking.

This innovative approach to language learning empowers students to become more fluent and self-assured English speakers.

6. Role-play in Real-world Scenarios

Ask your students to prepare role-plays that mimic real-world scenarios, such as shopping, ordering food, or making appointments.

This practical approach to learning takes them beyond the confines of traditional classroom exercises and immerses them in everyday situations. T

Through role-playing, students get to practice conversational English in a structured yet dynamic context.

It allows them to apply their language skills in practical situations, enhancing their ability to communicate effectively in real-life settings.

This method is particularly effective in familiarizing them with common phrases and vocabulary used in daily interactions.

Additionally, role-playing can be a fun and interactive way to learn, helping to reduce the anxiety often associated with speaking a new language.

By engaging in these simulated experiences, students gain confidence and fluency, which are crucial for their overall language development.

7. Grammar Worksheets

This is a classic form of homework for ESL students, to offer them worksheets that concentrate on specific grammar points, such as verb tenses, sentence structure, or prepositions.

Regular practice with these worksheets is instrumental in solidifying their understanding of English grammar.

This methodical approach allows students to focus on one aspect of grammar at a time, ensuring a thorough grasp of each concept.

Such targeted exercises help correct common mistakes and deepen their comprehension of the language’s structure.

By consistently working through these grammar worksheets, students build a strong grammatical foundation, which is vital for effective English communication.

This foundational knowledge enhances their writing and speaking skills and boosts their confidence in correctly using the language in various contexts.

For some tips on how to teach grammar to ESL students, we’ve put together a guide to help teachers everywhere!

Related Article: How to Teach Grammar to ESL Students – Teacher’s Guide

8. Online Games

Motivate your students to engage with educational language games available online.

These games offer a fun, interactive way to learn and practice English.

Students can improve various language skills through game-based learning, including vocabulary, grammar, reading, and even listening comprehension.

The interactive nature of these games makes the learning process more enjoyable and less intimidating, especially for younger learners or beginners.

As students play, they receive immediate feedback on their performance, which helps reinforce correct usage and understanding.

This approach enhances their language skills and keeps them motivated and engaged in their learning.

Online language games provide a dynamic and enjoyable way to supplement traditional learning methods, making language practice an activity that students can look forward to.

For some ideas of classroom games, both traditional and digital, check out the guide below!

Related Article: Fun Classroom Games to Play – Teacher’s Guide

9. Book Club

Another great idea is to start a book club in your class, where students can read and discuss a common book.

This collaborative activity enhances their reading skills and promotes critical thinking and group discussion skills in English.

Choosing books that are appropriate for their language level, the book club encourages students to dive into stories and themes, expanding their vocabulary and comprehension.

Discussing the book with their peers allows them to share perspectives, articulate their thoughts, and engage in meaningful conversations in English.

This interactive and social approach to learning also builds a sense of community among the students, making English learning a shared and enjoyable experience.

The book club thus becomes a platform for growth, not just in language proficiency but also in cognitive and social skills.

10. Pen Pal Program

The tenth great homework idea for ESL students is to start a pen pal program with English-speaking individuals from different parts of the world.

This initiative provides a unique opportunity for students to engage in regular written communication with native English speakers.

Through exchanging letters or emails, students practice their writing skills in a real-world context, learning to express their thoughts and ideas clearly in English.

This regular interaction not only improves their language proficiency but also offers valuable insights into different cultures and lifestyles, enhancing their cultural understanding and global awareness.

The pen pal program is more than just a language exercise; it’s a bridge that connects students across cultures, promoting international friendships and broadening their perspectives.

This kind of cultural exchange can be a highly rewarding and motivating experience, encouraging students to apply their language skills in meaningful and authentic interactions.

You can reach out to other teachers on platforms like LinkedIn and see if they would be willing to start a pen pal initiative for both them and your students.

The homework ideas presented for ESL students transcend the traditional concept of assignments.

They are designed as interactive learning experiences that not only build language skills but do so in a way that is practical, enjoyable, and highly effective.

Integrating these varied activities into the ESL curriculum allows teachers to cultivate a dynamic and nurturing learning environment.

Such an approach encourages students to actively engage with the English language, not just within the confines of the classroom but in their everyday lives as well.

Promoting this kind of immersive learning experience makes students more likely to develop a lasting proficiency and a genuine appreciation for the language.

These activities, therefore, play a crucial role in shaping confident, competent English speakers who are prepared to navigate the global landscape.

We hope you find value in this article; let us know if you require any assistance.

Have a wonderful day!

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Top 7 English Homework Tips for Teachers, Students and Parents

7 ways to create meaningful English homework. Tips for teachers, parents and students

Homework. The bane of student life everywhere. And teachers too! Won’t someone please think of the teachers?

It has been one of the hottest debates among progressives and traditionalists in education circles for many years now; is homework help or a hindrance?

Millions of student hours per year are wasted on busy work, which adds little to student learning. But that doesn’t mean that the judicious use of homework can’t add greatly to student learning, particularly in an area as complex as literacy.

Regarding reading and writing homework, there are good points to be made on both sides. But, as with many hot-button issues, the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.

In this article, we will look at what we need to consider when we set homework to ensure it provides value to our students’ learning. We will look at what to do, what not to do, and just how much of it to do.

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 1: Bin the Busy Work!

english homework | busy homework | Top 7 English Homework Tips for Teachers, Students and Parents | literacyideas.com

Ask your average student what their pet peeve is regarding their current station in life, and more often than not, homework will be mentioned in the reply. It is just as much a fixture in the life of a student as an oven is in the life of a baker. Unfortunately, as many students robotically complete their homework as teachers that robotically set the tasks. And here lies our first problem – busy work!

Homework should ALWAYS be focused. It should be carefully designed and purposeful. Without clear objectives built-in, the homework serves little to no pedagogical purpose. It is more likely to be a waste of the student’s time and the time of the teacher who is doomed to mark it.

The first rule of Homework Club is Bin the Busy Work!

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 2: Make The Homework Fit for Purpose

english homework | english homework tasks | Top 7 English Homework Tips for Teachers, Students and Parents | literacyideas.com

It may seem obvious, but homework must be suited to the ability of the student. How often have diligent students pulled their hair out struggling over a problem all night, press-ganging parents into the effort, only to be soundly trounced by a problem Einstein himself would need his morning coffee before attempting.

Avoid setting homework that will stretch the student to the elastic limits of their abilities. We don’t want anyone ‘snapping’ here. The material chosen for reading or writing homework should, however, challenge the student to some degree. Just as with strength training, some resistance is required to build ‘muscle’ here.

As in Rule #1 above, homework should be carefully designed to achieve a certain objective. But, one size most certainly doesn’t fit all. Be sure to differentiate homework appropriately for the different abilities of different students. Often, you won’t need to set different tasks, a slight tweak in the instructions given will be enough to make it suitable for the various ability levels.

YEAR LONG DIGITAL READING LOG / DIARY

english homework | digitalreadinglog | Top 7 English Homework Tips for Teachers, Students and Parents | literacyideas.com

Leap into the CLASSROOM OF THE FUTURE and ditch your paper-based reading logs or journals FOREVER. This dynamic BUNDLE OF RESOURCES allows you to track and assess your students reading with far more efficiency and effectiveness than ever before. INCLUDING: ✔ A dynamic DIGITAL READING SURVEY which AUTOMATICALLY ADAPTS based upon the genre of book your students are reading and what point of the text they are up to ✔ A pre-written LETTER FOR PARENTS AND STUDENTS explaining how it all works and the clear benefits it offers teachers, students and parents. ✔ A set of POSTERS AND BOOKMARKS matched to your class reading log so you kids can access this ANYTIME, ANYWHERE on ANY DEVICE ✔ A VIDEO TUTORIAL explaining how to edit, customize and deliver this to parents and students with ease, as well as how to sort, filter and manage your student data

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 3: Set Time Limits

make sure you have a dedicated time frame for homework

We all have both good days and bad days, and all sorts of days in between. Regardless of what sort of day you had, one thing is for sure, there were 24 hours in it. One of the more difficult things as a teacher, especially in a school with a vague homework policy, is just how much homework to set. The answer is, of course, it depends , and while time is certainly an imperfect means of gauging this, it at least provides some guidelines.

Just how much time depends on quite a few things. The time of year, for example. If exams are ongoing, you may want to avoid heaping extra pressure on your students. Perhaps too, your school has a very prescriptive homework policy that restricts your flexibility in terms of how much time you can set for homework tasks.

All that aside, the general wisdom on setting homework is that it should start at around 10 minutes for grade 1 and gradually increase by around ten minutes per grade, up to a maximum of 2 hours per day for the oldest students.

Like most things in teaching, however, this is more of an art than a cold, hard science. Pay attention to your students and how they are bearing up under the workload. Your priority here should always be to maximize the learning done in the classroom, so don’t overdo it.

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 4: Give Timely Feedback

homework without feedback is a complete waste of time

For feedback to be useful, it must be timely. If a student has spent hours composing an essay; researching their material, drafting an outline, organising their structure, writing and rewriting to submit their finished piece only to be told 4 weeks later that the third paragraph lacks purpose, the third paragraph will not be the only thing that lacks purpose.

If feedback is to be of any value, you must strike while the mental forge is still hot. Our students’ lives are most likely busy and interesting. Often their focus will be transient, if not downright fickle. If you want your feedback to stick – it must be delivered while the smoke still hangs in the air.

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 5: Get Creative with the Tasks

boring english homework is painful for students. be creative

Many of our students hate homework. Perhaps ‘despise’ would be a better word. And is it any wonder? Especially when it comes to reading and writing. Learning to read and write well requires lots of practice, and a certain amount of repetition is inescapable. But, I would argue, there should be no reason for homework to be boring. There isn’t a more wondrous subject in the world than literacy, after all!

Reading and writing are very broad areas of learning. Ample opportunities are afforded to allow you to come up with engaging and creative ways for your students to reinforce their learning. You just need to begin with your learning objective and reverse engineer unique ways to get there.

Let’s take instruction writing as an example. Say you have already taught the key criteria of instruction writing: a title, a resource list, some diagrams with captions, bullet or numbered points, use of transition words and imperatives etc. You now want the students to consolidate their understanding of the genre by writing their own set of instructions at home, but how to do it in an interesting fashion?

Well, let’s brainstorm and see if we can’t make things a little more interesting for our students. Recipes are a type of instruction writing. You could set them the task of writing a recipe for their favorite sandwich, but that’s kind of, well, lame!

How about writing a recipe for the most disgusting sandwich in the world? Yes, now that’s much better. Maybe they could word process it too and include Creative Commons images to support the text, Or, they could even make a script and record a video instructional, sharpening up their video-editing skills along the way.

Regardless of which of these methods you choose, your students would still be fulfilling the original objective of reinforcing their understanding of the criteria of the genre.

Bear in mind, however, you should not set homework that requires students to use resources that they don’t have access to, so be sure to give this due consideration when getting creative with your homework tasks.

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 6: Leverage Interest

pump up the purpose and value of homework to your students

“ You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink ”, as the old saying goes – and it certainly applies to homework.

This rule relies heavily on the relationship you build with your students over time. Allied to the point above, there are a million different ways to teach an objective, but try to engineer activities that leverage the specific interests of your students.

If you are setting a homework task to reinforce reading comprehension skills, for example, are there opportunities for you to select, or allow your students to select, material that they are interested in?

The same applies when selecting topics for writing. Where student interest is engaged, learning often becomes effortless.

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 7: Give Homework At The Start of the Lesson

make homework a priority in your planning, not an afterthought.

It is general practice to give homework at the end of the lesson. By then, you will have introduced a lesson objective, worked through some examples during class, and now you can set homework for the students to further consolidate their understanding at home.

It makes sense, right? Well, yes, but there is another option.

Sharing the homework task with your students at the start of class may, at times, be preferable. There are several benefits to this. Often, at the end of class, our students are worn out. They are like greyhounds at the starting gate, raring to go home, to the next class, or for lunch. The last place their attention is is on more of the topic they have just been working on. Setting homework at the start of the class avoids the feeling like you are trying to herd cats at the end of class.

Another strong benefit to setting the homework at the start of the class is that it focuses the students on specific learning goals for the lesson to come. Students will be motivated to engage more with their learning as it will make their homework much easier to do that evening. Give it a go with your class and see!

The Takeaways

READING AND WRITING HOMEWORK DOESN’t HAVE TO BE A BATTLE

Homework should be used as a means of consolidating learning done in the classroom. Tasks should be focused and offer opportunities for students to improve their understanding of important concepts or develop specific skills.

Homework should be designed in such a way that it is manageable by students. It should not be beyond the limits of their abilities and time limits should be set to prevent student frustration from boiling over if they struggle to complete it.

Feedback needs to be given in a timely fashion for it to serve any useful purpose. This means that consideration must be given to your workload when assigning homework. Will you have enough time to mark the students’ work and provide the necessary feedback in a timely manner?

If not, reconsider the tasks you are setting. Remember, you may also find value in peer assessment activities too.

Also, try setting homework at the start of class to motivate student participation in the lesson to come. And, you’ll avoid that tussle at lesson’s end as the students rush for the door!

Literacy is such a fascinating subject area that there will always be room to create interesting homework tasks. You just require a little space to allow your imagination to run freely. The personal interests of your students can provide a great starting point for the creation of engaging and fun homework tasks.

Remember too, there’s an upper limit to how much homework you should set, and it may not always be necessary to set homework. When you do set homework, set it judiciously, and you will undoubtedly add to the learning experience of your students.

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English Homework

✔︎ free homework PDFs ✔︎ for teachers to use with ESL classes ✔︎ printer-friendly ✔︎ answers provided

Level: pre-intermediate

Grammar homework.

Homework: Present Continuous I am doing, I am not doing...
Homework: Present Simple I am, I am not, I have, I don't have...
Homework: Future Simple I will do, I won't do...
Homework: SHOULD/SHOULDN'T you should do, you shouldn't do...
Homework: Past Continuous I was doing, we were doing, they were doing...
Homework: MUST vs HAVE TO must do, mustn't do, have to do, don't have to do...
Homework: Comparative Adjectives colder, better, easier, more expensive...
Homework: Superlative Adjectives the smallest, the worst, the most expensive...
Homework: Definite or Indefinite Article a, at, the
Homework: Demonstrative Determiners this, that, these, those
Homework: Zero Conditional If I don't get exercise, I get fat
Homework: First Conditional If you go to bed late, you’ll be tired tomorrow
Homework: Second Conditional If I saw a snake, I would scream
Homework: GOING TO it is going to rain...
Homework: Prepositions of Place at, in, above, below...
Homework: Prepositions of Time at, in, on

Level: intermediate

Reported Statements She said that she was bored. He told me he was tired...
Modal Verbs must, can, would, may, ought to...
Nouns as Adjectives horse race, accounts department, shoe store...
Homework: Interrogative Pronouns who, whom, whose, which, what...
Grading Adverbs slightly, rather, very, extremely...
Non-Gradable Adjectives freezing, tiny, filthy, boiling, furious...
Homework: Reported Speech Tom said he was bored, I asked where he was...
Homework: Countable vs Uncountable Nouns job/work, suitcase/luggage...
Homework: Tag Questions It's cold, isn't it?...
Homework: Phrasal Verbs put up, turn off, break down...
Homework: Future Continuous I will be doing, I won't be doing...
Homework: Future Perfect I will have done, I won't have done...
Homework: Past Perfect Continuous I had been doing, I hadn't been doing...
Homework: Past Perfect I had seen, he had seen...
Homework: Reflexive Pronouns myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself...
Homework: Adverbs of Place where, here, there, downstairs, everywhere...
Homework: Adverbs of Degree fairly, pretty, quite, extremely, totally...
Homework: Adverbs of Manner badly, well, slowly, easily, loudly...
Homework: Adverbs of Time now, then, yesterday, tomorrow, earlier...
Homework: BE USED TO vs USED TO I’m used to waking up early / I used to wake up early...
Homework: Third Conditional If I had known it was your birthday, I would have sent you a card
Homework: Coordinating Conjunctions for, and, but, or, yet...
Homework: Subordinating Conjunctions although, despite, while, because, since...
Homework: Indefinite Pronouns somebody, anybody, nothing, everything, anywhere...
Homework: Infinitive or -ing to be/being, to do/doing, to eat/eating...
Homework: Passive Voice is made, are used, was born, was invented, were stolen...
Homework: Past Simple vs Present Perfect Simple I did vs I have done...
Homework: Present Perfect Simple vs Continuous I have done vs I have been doing...
Homework: Quantifiers a few, a little, much, many, a lot of...
Homework: Possessive Pronouns mine, yours, his...
Homework: Relative Pronouns who, whom, which, that...

Vocabulary Homework

Homework: Measure Words with Uncountable Nouns packet, piece, grain, bar, jar...
Homework: Prepositions of Movement towards, over, around, across, past...
Homework: Common Prepositions as, for, since, but, plus...
Homework: Nouns the are Countable and Noncountable delight/delights, iron/irons, glass/glasses...
Homework: Negative Contractions mustn't, daren't, can't, won't, mightn't...
Homework: Positive Contractions it's, it'll, we've, he'd, she'll...
Homework: Partitive Expressions with Uncountable Nouns piece of advice, drop of blood, grain of truth...
Homework: Common Collocations take a photo, do your nails, pay attention...
Homework: Company Structure Vocabulary A.G.M., president, Sales Dept, shareholder...
Homework: Internet Vocabulary phishing, forum, subscribe, hacker, forward...
Homework: Presentations Vocabulary marker, flip chart, finally, microphone, OHP...
Homework: Meetings Vocabulary ballot, adjourn, vote, agenda, minutes...
Homework: Resume Vocabulary skill, bilingual, reference, cover letter, career...
Homework: Numbers Vocabulary plus, subtract, kilo, zero, billion...
Homework: Negotiation Vocabulary haggle, dispute, deadlock, compromise, low-ball...
Homework: Marketing Vocabulary brand, trademark, launch, product, digital marketing...
Homework: Newspaper Vocabulary editor, tabloid, journalist, sensationalist, headline...
Homework: Insurance Vocabulary premium, policy, claim, goods in transit, liability...
Homework: Pollution Vocabulary sewage, smog, industrialised, fossil fuels, pollution...
Homework: Advertising Vocabulary billboard, target, ad, promote, commercial...
Homework: Property Vocabulary tenant, rent, estate agent, freehold, landlord...
Homework: Law Vocabulary jury, barrister, sentence, sue, attorney...
Homework: Money Vocabulary invest, hard currency, transaction, cashier...
Homework: Animal Vocabulary herd, kitten, lioness, calf, peacock...
Homework: Medical Vocabulary pain, swollen, allergic, side-effects...
Homework: Air Travel Vocabulary baggage claim, board, jet-lag, runway...
Homework: Body Vocabulary calf, cheeks, liver, thumb, wrist...
Homework: Rooms, Furniture, Appliances Vocabulary attic, counter, freezer, hallway...
Homework: Telephone Vocabulary hang up, pay phone, missed call, receiver...
Homework: Employment Vocabulary dismiss, interview, recruit, salary, staff...
Homework: Criminals Vocabulary arsonist, bigamist, burglar, murderer, thief...
Homework: Computer Vocabulary app, email, modem, external drive, ebook...
Homework: Weather Vocabulary chilly, flood, hail, drought, temperature...
Homework: Music Vocabulary band, beat, verse, genre, artist...
Homework: Movies Vocabulary sci-fi, director, cast, genre, comedy...
Homework: Sports Vocabulary score, compete, cheer on, beat, train...
Homework: Cooking Verbs boil, grate, whisk, fry, stir...
Homework: Confusing Words accept/except, bring/take, raise/rise...
Homework: Homophones bear/bare, fare/fair, desert/dessert...
Homework: Interjections hmm, shh, yuck, aah, wow...
Homework: CAN, COULD, BE ABLE TO I can run, I could run, I will be able to run...
Homework: Modal Verbs of Deduction can't be, must be, could have been...
Homework: Prefixes re-, mis-, over-, under-, ex-...
Homework: Opposite Prefixes INappropriate, IRregular, IMpolite...
Homework: Adjective Suffixes -ing, -ous, -able, -ive, -ful...
Homework: Noun Suffixes -al, -er, -ment, -ness, -tion, -y...

See also: Talking Point Homework and Discussion

The Cult of Homework
Who Invented Homework?
The pros and cons of homework for English language learners

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by Claudia Pesce 383,160 views

But ESL students, on the other hand, may disagree. Adult learners will argue that they have busy schedules and a life outside the classroom, which translates into “ ”. Young learners and teens may come to terms with the fact that they have to do homework, but do we want them to do it because they are compelled to do it... or do we want them to do it because they are excited to do it? Which would you prefer?

The only way to get young students excited about doing homework, and get adults to set aside some time for it, is through . And here are 5 examples:

A Word Book or Vocabulary Journal is a classic among teachers of very young learners who are not adept at using dictionaries; here they have a chance to make their own. Help them design their very own Word Book from scratch, out of construction paper, cardboard, or any materials you have on hand. At the end of a reading task or activity, make a list of the words they have learned for the day. Their homework assignment is to enter each of the new words in their Word Book. The littlest ones simply copy the word and draw a picture of it; older students can use the word in a sentence that illustrates its meaning. There is no need to copy “dictionary” definitions. They may also cut out pictures from magazines or newspapers and get as creative as they like. But one thing is certain… these will be words they won’t easily forget!

This is an extremely engaging way to provide extended practice of any grammar point. Say you want your students to practice . Tell them you need information on this year's Oscar nominations. Tell them to go to and give them a list of questions they must answer:

You may assign any number of research tasks: ideal places for a family vacation ( ), best restaurants in the city ( ), or anything based on local information. Just make sure you give them a website to go to, a set of questions to answer or a task to complete, and above all don't forget to plan the assignment with a grammar point or learning objective in mind.

This is an ideal assignment for adult students. Most read the newspaper anyway, right? Or watch the evening news. Ask them to choose a news story that has piqued their interest, and have them:

”, thus prompting them to use , for example ( )

This is clearly one of the homework assignments that works best with adult learners or those who specifically study . Give them an email to read and ask them to write an appropriate reply. Or give them a situation that would require them to compose a message, like a complaint over a bad service experience or an inquiry into vacation rentals.

Choose a TV series that is shown in English, either with or without subtitles (you may ask students to cover the subtitles). Choose a show that is suitable to your students’ ages. Tell your students that their homework for that night will be to watch an episode of , whether they usually watch the show or not. Give them a task to complete after viewing the episode: a synopsis of the episode, a character description, or a questionnaire (Do you usually watch this show? If not, would you start watching it? Why/why not?)

Another great way to get students actively engaged in their homework assignments is to ask them to come up with some ideas for creative assignments on their own and share them with the class. They may surprise you!

And if you’re still stumped as to which worksheets to assign to , , or , BusyTeacher.org is always available to help, 24/7, with wonderful ideas for activities and great ready-to-print worksheets.

If you enjoyed this article, please help spread it by clicking one of those sharing buttons below. And if you are interested in more, you should follow our Facebook page where we share more about creative, non-boring ways to teach English.

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StoryLearning

Learn A Language Through Stories

11 ESL Homework Ideas To Engage Your Learners & Simplify Lesson Planning

Are you looking for ESL homework ideas for your classes? If you’re thinking about setting homework you’re onto a good thing. Learning a language requires a lot of exposure and practice. And much of that happens outside of class.

The more students make contact with English outside the classroom, the faster they’ll progress. And if you can connect their homework assignments to what you’re teaching in class, you’ll make lesson planning a lot easier for yourself.

So, without further ado, here are 11 ESL homework ideas for adults that you can use with groups, individuals, in-person or online.

If you want to become a qualified online language teacher and earn a living from home, I recommend checking out CeOLT (Certificate of Online Language Teaching).

Click here to find out more .

How To Make Homework Work For You &Your Students

Many ESL teachers are wary of setting homework because students often don’t do it! You may remember being set useless homework in language classes that you weren't motivated to do, such as learning lists of words for a test.

The problem is, if ESL learners rely too much on you or on coming to lessons, they will make slow progress because so much language learning takes place outside of the classroom.

The trick then is to integrate homework assignments into what happens in class so that it becomes non-negotiable. In the list of ESL homework ideas below, you’ll find tasks that are fun and motivating to do as well as ways to fit them into your class time.

1.Read A Short Story Or Short Book Chapter

Reading is the foundation of the StoryLearning method and makes for the perfect ESL homework idea.

Instead of spending time reading in class, get the students to do it between classes.

They can find a quiet time to read the story or chapter as many times as they like.

In my short story books , they’ll find tools to help them understand the material such as glossaries and comprehension questions.

In class, students can then discuss the chapter or story together. If you’re teaching 1:1, you can ask them to present a summary and show you new words they learned from the chapter. You can then discuss it together.

For more ideas on how to use my short story books for teaching check out my Short Stories teacher’s Guide .

2. Listen To A Short Podcast Episode

Many ESL students struggle with English listening skills so they need as much practice as possible.

If you teach conversation classes then this activity will also mean fewer lesson planning headaches. And you won’t waste any class time on listening.

Tell your student to listen to a short ESL podcast such as the BBC’s 6-Minute English podcast. Ask them to prepare a summary of it to present to you in class. If the episode includes show notes, they can compare their summary with those notes.

You can also adapt this homework activity for groups and ask them to discuss the podcast in pairs in class. This is also a great opportunity to use class time to clarify and new words, or structures that came up in the episode.

If you’re feeling ambitious or your students have a high level, you could plan a whole series of lessons or a semester around a particular podcast such as a true crime or other investigative journalism show.

3. Presentation About A Passion

Not everyone is passionate about learning English and many ESL students come to class because they have to. But even if they’re not interested in English, they must be interested in something, right?

You can harness their hobbies and passions and generate some excitement for the English language by asking them to present a special object to the rest of the class.

This can also work well in a 1:1 online lesson. You can ask your student to prepare a short talk about an object that they hold up to the webcam to show you.

You can use time in class to work on presentation and storytelling skills. You can model this type of presentation by telling them about your own significant object so they know what to aim for.

4. Write A Review

Who doesn’t love sharing their opinion whether it’s about the latest movie they’ve seen or the hot new restaurant they had dinner at?

You can harness this desire and get your student to practice useful language by getting them to write reviews as homework. These could be movie reviews, product reviews, restaurant reviews etc.

In class, you can take a look at the structure of reviews in English plus the language used such as colourful adjectives or phrases for giving opinions.

That way, your students will have a model they can use to write their own reviews at home. Back in class, students can share their reviews with each other and discuss them – would they see this movie, buy this product etc or not based on the review.

You can also give feedback both about the content of the reviews as well as any language points to improve.

5. Get Creative

Creativity requires constraints and there’s no greater one than writing a story in your second, third or fourth language.

You can challenge students to write a short story based on words they’ve learned recently in class or on a particular topic you’ve been discussing. Give them a word count to respect as well.

Again, you can use class time to read stories together and analyse their structure so that they know what to aim for.

After they’ve written a short story at home, they can come back to class to read and discuss each others’ stories.

6. Share Amazing Anecdotes

Telling an interesting anecdote is a real skill in any language, especially in a new one that you're learning. But it's a great way to work on your speaking skills.

You can use your class time to read or listen to anecdotes in English. You could even tell your learners a funny or sad story about yourself. Once they’ve understood what makes a great anecdote, it’s time to create their own one for homework.

At home, learners can write their anecdotes, or even better, can prepare and rehearse them orally, so they’re ready to tell them in class.

During the lesson, you and the other students can react to the anecdotes and ask follow-up questions.

7. Blogs And Blogging

Did you know that blogs are an incredibly rich resource for language learning and teaching? You can use blogs in many ways both inside and outside of the classroom.

As a homework activity you could ask students to read a blog post of their choice and leave a comment for the writer.

If your students prefer watching YouTube videos, they can watch videos and leave comments underneath them.

In both cases, in class time, students can report back on the blog they read, why they chose it and what comment they left and why.

If you and your students are feeling really ambitious, you could start a class blog or they could start writing their own individual blogs about their English learning journeys.

For even more inspiration for your teaching, check out these best ESL bloggers .

8. Start A Podcast

This one is a bit more ambitious, but as well as listening to podcasts, learners can also consider starting their own!

In fact, English learner Daniel Goodson from Switzerland started his podcast, My Fluent Podcast , to develop his speaking skills and gain confidence. He interviews other learners who have similar projects.

Of course, your students don’t have to make the podcast public. It can simply be a project between you and the members of the class. They could interview each other or otherwise upload short episodes on a topic of their choice.

Again, if they do this outside of class as homework you can use time in class to give them feedback on their work. Their episodes can also be a springboard for further discussion as well as a listening comprehension activity for the other students.

9. Class WhatsApp Group

Another way for students to use English outside the classroom thanks to digital tools is to create a class WhatsApp group.

Other chat apps like Telegram or Voxer would work just as well.

In this group, you can ask your students questions or share material for them to discuss.

Their homework in this case could be as simple as sending at least one message per week in the group. For more ideas about using apps check out this post about English teaching apps.

10. Write A Letter

Do you remember writing letters to a pen friend when you were learning languages at school?

Instead of writing letters to someone else, your students can try some creative writing activities that involve writing letters to themselves.

That’s right, you can ask them to write a letter to their younger self with advice or to their future self about goals and dreams. There’s even a website where you can write and schedule a letter to your future self called FutureMe .

This activity is quite a personal one so you’d need to be willing to get vulnerable yourself and share your letter before encouraging your students to talk to each other about the content of their letters.

11. The Student Becomes The Teacher

Here’s an interesting reversal of classroom roles that works well with groups. For homework, you can ask your students to teach the rest of the class some new vocabulary or a spelling or grammar rule.

You won’t expect them to give a whole class on the topic. But they could do a short presentation of the topic in the format they prefer – through song or story or in a more traditional way.

As long as you keep expectations clear, they’ll benefit from peer teaching this way. After all, you can only teach what you’ve understood well yourself.

11 ESL Homework Ideas

So there you have it – 11 engaging ESL homework ideas that your students will actually want to do outside of class!

As you can see, these ESL homework ideas are a million miles away from the types of boring worksheets that you had to fill in for language classes at school.

Thanks to these engaging ideas, you’ll make your lesson planning easier and your students will be excited to do their homework. And they’ll start to become more independent learners who make faster progress.

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The best ESL / EFL homework ideas that require no marking 2021

April 9th, 2018 / Materials

Homework is an important part of study, but it can be overwhelming for a TEFL teacher with a mountain of exercise books to mark.

To avoid this, smart ESL teachers should set some (if not, the bulk) of their ESL homework assignments as independent study which the teacher does not have to correct.

Why set no-marking ESL homework?

First of all, you are not short-changing your students by asking them to go out and learn some English themselves.

Languages are an enormous subject ; there is no way that you could teach your students everything they need to know in the few hours a week they have with you.

In reality, if your students want to get good at English, they must listen, read, watch and practice the language in their own time.

No-marking assignments have benefits for class time also. Students can recap on the last class or prepare for the next one by watching grammar videos.

Teachers can use material from a podcast or video as the basis of a speaking activity.

This is why, I believe, that TEFL teachers set a no-marking study assignment at least once a week. It’s better for your students, your classes and your own sanity.

The following assignments have been divided into: Listening, Reading, Writing Grammar, Vocabulary and Pronunciation . First up, listening

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Listening assignments

Podcasts are a great way to practice comprehension. In additional, the material can be used for speaking practice the following lesson as students share with each other what they have learnt from the episode.

Mistakes to avoid when choosing a podcast

Do not choose a podcast that is too long. Four to 10 minutes is the sweet spot – anything longer your students will get confused and the task will become a chore.

Do not choose a podcast which speaks unnaturally slowly or with a childish topic. Students need to get used to the normal pace of speaking and how native speakers actually use the language. OK, so granted, ESL podcasts do have to be simpler but anything that is overly contrived is a waste of your students’ time.

Do not use a website that requires flash player to play an MP3. Access to any homework material should be really, really easy or you’ll find that half your students won’t complete the assignment.

The best ESL Podcasts

BBC 6 Minute English

Lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate British

This is without doubt the best EFL podcast on the list and the one that I use time and time again. Updated weekly, Six minute English provides fun and interesting ESL podcasts on topics such as culture, technology, travel, business and more. They’ll always include at least three new phrases to learn and after listening, students can check their understanding with the transcript.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/6-minute-english

Podcasts in English

Elementary to Intermediate British

The first homework is www.podcastsinenglish .com. This site provides free three to five minute podcasts for English learners for beginner, intermediate and upper-intermediate level. To practice comprehension and expand vocabulary, tell your students to listen to two podcasts a week and write a summary of what they hear. To do this effectively, they’ll have to listen a few times.

Negative: The podcasts are free but to read the transcript students must pay for the premium version.

https://www.podcastsinenglish.com

Upper-intermediate-advanced American

CNN 10 is not an TEFL podcast, it is a real news show which condenses world news for that day down to 10 minutes. Despite this, it provides a great way for higher-level students to practice their listening skills while keeping abreast or world news. The video can be accessed in the CNN app and students can read the full transcript afterwards to check their understanding.

Negative: Not made for ESL and so speech can be fast.

https://edition.cnn.com/cnn10

Elementary to Intermediate Variable

Elllo provides thousands of free English video lessons and ESL podcasts on everyday English conversation. The podcasts consist of a dialogue between two people about an everyday topic. They are short and sweet but there are thousands of them and so you could ask your students to do one a day without much time commitment from them.

The best thing about ELLLO podcasts is that students can check their understanding with the transcript AND a quiz.

Negative: Podcasts are under three minutes.

http://www.elllo.org

Upper intermediate-advanced Variable

TED provides thousands of videos about technology, education, politics, science and culture.

In my experience setting a TED talk for homework can be hit and miss. Sometimes I’d set a TED video and everyone would love it and other times they’d complain that it was too long, too fast or too confusing to understand.

TED is still a great resource but when choosing a talk for homework this is my advice:

Choose a video which is no more than 10 minutes long. You can separate talks by duration, topic and language in the talk tab.

Check that the speaker isn’t speaking too fast and the accent isn’t too thick (native speakers are best).

Another way to do this is to choose a theme such as ‘business’ ‘finance’ ‘or ‘crime’ and ask your students to select and watch a TED video on the subject. Centre your following class around this theme and give your students 10 to 15 minutes to recount their video to their partners. This is a great way to reinforce the lesson vocabulary and engage your students with the topic.

https://www.ted.com

TED ED: A much better choice!

A much better choice of listening is TED ED. TED Ed is full of short educational videos about science, culture and history. You’re students will be able to follow the listening much better because along with the speaker’s voice there are animations to help tell the story.

Best of all the videos are only five minutes long and so it’s a homework activity that everyone has time to do.

https://ed.ted.com/

ESL Lounge provides short readings and gap fill exercises divided into elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced. Students can check their understanding with a quiz at the end.

http://www.esl-lounge.com/student/reading.php

Five Minute English

Five minute English also provides short reading exercises. All activities come with a glossary of new words and a quiz at the end so your students can check their understanding. The only drawback is that the readings are not defined by level.

http://www.5minuteenglish.com/reading.htm

Grammar review

Viewing video lessons to either recap on the last grammar class or prepare for the next one is another highly productive no-marking homework activity.

Here are the best grammar video resources.

ENGVID Provides bite-sized video lessons on most aspects of English grammar and lots of vocabulary points. Students can also read a transcript of the lesson and check their understanding with a quiz on their website.

https://www.engvid.com

Let’s Talk: Youtube

You need it, you’ll find it here. This Youtube channel has hundreds of videos on every aspect of the English language.

Grammar and vocabulary quizzes

If you’ve just finished a grammar topic, setting your students a few grammar quizzes is a good way to review the lesson. There are dozens of grammar quiz sites out there, but proceed with caution: many of these sites are spammy with annoying adverts and pop ups all over the page. They are difficult to navigate for a native speaker never mind a student.

The BBC also offers a comprehensive library of grammar resources and quizzes for English learners. However, I haven’t included them in the list because you need a flash player to use them.

The websites I have selected also have adverts but they are not invasive. They have also established sites within the TEFL community.

Dave’s ESL Café (grammar)

This site provides a meeting point for TEFL teachers to ask and answer questions and share resources. A little known fact is that Dave’s ESL Café also boasts hundreds of quizzes on various grammar and vocabulary points, written by teachers.

http://www.eslcafe.com/quiz

ESL-lounge (grammar)

ESL-lounge is another well-known site for TEFL resources, it also has a library of grammar quizzes for students.

http://www.esl-lounge.com/student/

British Council Teens (vocabulary)

The best vocabulary quiz I have found comes from The British Council Teens site. Here users must match pictures and words together to learn vocabulary. All words come with an audio so students can check their pronunciation.

http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/grammar-vocabulary/vocabulary-exercises

Writing is an essential skill and, as a TEFL teacher, you must set and mark writing assignments.

But what if there were a way for students to practice writing independently as well?

Well, there is.

Do you remember when you were learning French or Spanish at school and your teachers encouraged you to start a correspondence with a foreign pen pal to improve your language skills?

Well, the concept still exists. If a few of the class take it up, it can also become an interesting weekly speaking practice as you catch up on the news from their pen friends, and as a group, correct the grammar and spelling on their next correspondence.

Popular Pen Pal sites

http://www.penpalworld.com

https://www.globalpenfriends.com

https://www.penpalsnow.com/index.html

Pronunciation

Pronunciation is often the blight of an ESL class. Bad pronunciation should be corrected , but if you have a large class it is often difficult to give that one-on-one attention to a student who is really struggling to improve.

This is why asking your students to watch pronunciation videos and practice in their own time is a worthwhile homework exercise. Here are some of the best sites to learn.

Rachel’s English: Accent American

Rachel’s English undoubtedly provides one of the most comprehensive pronunciation resources on the web. Rachel will walk your students through all of the sounds in the English language. In addition, she has videos on the rhythm of English, elision (when speakers drop vowel sounds as they link words together in a sentence) and common idioms.

http://rachelsenglish.com

Youglish: Accent International

Youglish uses YouTube to teach the pronunciation of any English word. Simply write the word into the search bar and Youglish will bring up a snippet of a video with someone using it. It is truly brilliant.

https://youglish.com

BBC Learning English Pronunciation Guide: Accent British

Teacher Jamie teaches students all the common sounds in the English language.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/pronunciation

For more on pronunciation, check out our pronunciation http://bilinguanation.com/english-pronunciation-activities-for-your-esl-class/ guide.

Cambridge PET, FCE, CAE Exam

If your students want to sit the Cambridge English exam then they can find everything they need to prepare with Flo-Joe.com. Here students will find a rich archive of free listening, reading, speaking and writing papers from each exam level. Listening and reading exams come with their own answer keys for self-correction. The writing paper, however, will have to be corrected by the teacher and speaking practice done in class.

https://www.flo-joe.co.uk

If your students are taking the IELTS exam, here are three resource sites where students can practice with past papers, complete with an answer key. Again any writing practice will have to be corrected by the teacher and speaking practice done in class.

https://takeielts.britishcouncil.org/prepare-test/british-council-online-resources

https://www.ieltsbuddy.com

https://ieltsforfree.com/

So these are my go-to sites for no-marking TEFL assignments. Have a I missed one? Do you know of an amazing podcast or ESL resource site that could benefit your fellow ESL teachers? Write it in the comments below and if it’s good I’ll include it in the list.

For more resource sites check out Free TEFL resource sites for your ESL students. Good luck and happy teaching!

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English Worksheets.

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73 ESL Writing Activities

From a student’s point of view, writing assignments are something to dread.

But from an ESL teacher’s point of view, they should be a challenge worth accepting.

The challenge for you is to motivate your students enough to actually be excited about writing.

Sounds impossible? It’s actually quite simple.

The key is a strong pre-writing activity that boosts their confidence and adds to their vocabulary at the same time.

So, how do you get your students’ writing off to a great start?

In this post, we’ll look at some different ESL writing activities that will transform your students from hesitant writers to confident wordsmiths in their own right.

Writing Assignments Based on Stories

Writing activities prompted by music, writing practice exercises based on images or pictures, writing assignments based on food, writing activities based on mysteries, exercises to practice writing emails, activities to practice writing advertisements, assignments to practice writing reports, creative writing activity: class newsletter/newspaper.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

People of all ages love a well-told story, and using stories to teach ESL is a sure winner.

A story for a pre-writing activity could be in the form of:

A movie . It could be a biography, sci-fi film, thriller, action-packed adventure, fairy tale or even a cartoon.
A story read aloud from a book. If you’re using this, read in a way that brings the characters’ voices to life (including the narrator’s), hold the book up to show any pictures within or scan them and project onto a screen as you read. You can also search YouTube videos of famous authors or celebrities reading a book aloud, and show these in class.
A story from the news . It could be from the TV, radio, newspaper or an online news site .
A story read by your students. In this case, you could let them read a story silently or with a partner, and take as long as they like to think about the important parts.

No matter what you choose, it’ll be a great lead-in to the ESL writing exercises below.

1. Re-tell the story as is, or summarize it. (This works best for beginners, who are still getting their feet wet in the waters of English comprehension.)

2. After watching “Finding Nemo” : Tell the story from the point of view of the whale, the dentist’s daughter or Bruce the shark.

3. Explain to Marlin how he should take care of Nemo better.

4. Make up a story about a farm animal/zoo animal/jungle animal. What if a baby ___ was lost? What if a child was lost in the city? What if you found a lost child?

5. After the story of “Goldilocks” : Tell the story from the baby bear’s point of view.

6. What if the baby bear and Goldilocks became best buds? What would happen?

7. After discussing “The Gingerbread Man” : Tell the story from the fox’s or gingerbread man’s point of view.

8. What did the old woman do wrong that made the gingerbread man run away?

9. How do you make a gingerbread man? What other shapes could be made instead?

10. After “Little Red Riding Hood” : Write the story in the first person—from the point of view of either Red Riding Hood or the wolf.

11. What should Red Riding Hood have done when she met the wolf?

12. After watching a “Lord of the Rings” movie: What would you do if you had the One Ring? Write about a magical quest you and several friends would have if you could.

13. After watching a “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie: What if you were a pirate? What adventures would you have if you were a pirate?

14. After watching “Titanic” : Write about what you discover when you dive onto the wreck. Or imagine you were on the ship when it sank, and talk about how you escaped.

15. Whose fault was it that so many people drowned on the Titanic? What should they have done?

16. After watching a “Star Wars” movie: Imagine you’re a space explorer and write about what happens when you meet some characters from “Star Wars.”

17. After watching a “Terminator” movie: Imagine your teacher is a robot that has come back from the future. Or imagine you have come back from the future—what would it be like?

18. After watching a “Harry Potter” movie: Make up some magic spells and explain how you’d use them.

Everybody loves music! Watch your students’ faces light up as soon as they realize that they’re about to be treated to some songs rather than chalk-and-talk. Music stirs the emotions, after all, and can get your students excited about writing.

Here are some ideas for music you can incorporate into ESL writing activities:

Classical music. There are some pieces of well-known classical music that specifically tell a story , and many of these are available on YouTube.
“Fantasia 2000,” particularly “Rhapsody in Blue.” This wonderful, wordless animated story can kick off so much great writing!
Movie music. The music that goes with a movie tells watchers how they should be feeling, and could be a good jumping-off point for some writing.
Popular songs and music. Self-explanatory. Check out the most popular or trending artists on YouTube or Spotify for ideas.
Kids’ songs . There’s something about singing a catchy little tune that makes the words stick in your mind more than just saying them. These can lead to some interesting writing, too.

19. After Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” : Tell the story from Peter’s point of view.

20. After Saint-Saëns’ “The Carnival of the Animals” : Imagine walking through the scenes with the animals and interacting with them. Write a story from the point of view of one of the animals.

21. Describe the animals in “The Carnival of the Animals.”

22. After Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” : Re-tell this classic Shakespeare story, adding a twist.

23. After watching and listening to “Rhapsody in Blue” : Tell all/part of the story.

24. If you were the main character in “Rhapsody in Blue,” what would you do?

25. Listen to a piece of classical/instrumental music and tell the story that it might be a background to. Imagine that it’s the background music for a movie.

26. Tell the story (real or made up) behind some popular songs like Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams.”

27. Describe meeting someone special like in the aforementioned Taylor Swift song.

28. What happens in your wildest dreams?

29. What if you were a famous pop star or musician? What would it be like? What would you do?

30. Give instructions on how to find your favorite song on the Internet, both music and lyrics.

31. If you play an instrument, or have a relative who plays one, write about some of the basics of how to play. (This could also work as a speaking and listening activity, and then the whole class could write about it.)

32. What is your favorite genre of music, and why? (Be sure to explain what “genre” means !)

33. Do you think young children should be allowed to freely watch music videos?

Some pictures you can use for ESL writing activities include:

Pictures from social media. If you use social media at all, you doubtless have a barrage of amazing photos and videos on your feed, all of which make for excellent writing prompts.
Pictures from Google Images . A quick Google search on any (classroom-safe) image will turn up plenty.
Cartoons . If you have young students, they’ll definitely enjoy this one.
Pictures selected by your students. Not sure what to choose? Have your students pick their own pictures to write about. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how vibrant their writing can be when they’re writing about subjects they actually care about.

Regardless of the picture you (or your students) choose, here are some writing prompts you can consider.

34. Tell a story—real or imagined—of what is happening in the picture.

35. Write about what happens next from the pictured moment.

36. Write about what was happening just before the pictured incident.

37. What if that was you in the picture?

38. What if you were the person who took the picture?

39. What if you knew the people in the picture? What would you say to them?

40. Describe all of the elements in the picture. This is great for vocabulary practice.

41. Describe how someone in the picture might be feeling.

42. Explain how to get into a pictured predicament (for example, in the picture here , how did he get into the boat without the crocodile eating him?) as well as how to get out of it.

43. Express an opinion about the rights and wrongs of the pictured situation. For example, for the same picture above: Should crocodiles be hunted and killed? What should happen if a crocodile kills someone?

Many of your students likely enjoy thinking and talking about food. So why wouldn’t they be motivated to write about it?

How you integrate food into your ESL writing assignments depends on your classroom arrangements and the amount of time you’re willing to put into preparation.

In any case, here are some ideas:

Start with the preparation and sharing of food before writing about it.
Look at pictures of food, and talk about them before moving on to writing.
Have students research food-related topics on the internet.
Start with a story about food.

Here are the specific food writing prompts:

44. After the story of “The Gingerbread Man”: Think about food that develops a life of its own, and what would happen with it. (This can also open up a discussion about cultural foods.) For example, make up a similar story about another piece of food (e.g., spaghetti or rice that comes alive). What if you felt something moving in your mouth after you bit into your burger?

45. Write a story (real or imagined) about being very hungry and/or finding/buying/stealing food to meet a desperate need.

46. Write a story about trying a new, unfamiliar kind of food—maybe in a (relevant) cross-cultural setting.

47. Write a story about finding and eating a food that has magical properties. (Maybe read or watch some or all of “Alice in Wonderland” first.)

48. Describe interesting/disgusting/unusual/delicious/colorful foods, especially after a class tasting lesson. (Prepare students first with suitable taste vocabulary .)

49. Describe a food that’s unfamiliar to most students in the class. (This is particularly helpful for classes where there are students belonging to minority groups who hesitate to speak up.)

50. Describe an imaginary magical food.

51. Give instructions for preparing a particular recipe.

52. After a class activity or demonstration involving food: Write down what you have learned.

53. Give instructions for producing food—growing vegetables, keeping animals, etc.

54. Give instructions for buying the best food—what to look for, looking at labels, checking prices and the like.

55. Write about your opinion on food and health in First World and Third World countries. (Explain what makes a country “First,” “Second” or “Third World” first.)

56. Write about your opinion on the cost of food.

57. Write about your opinion on GMOs or genetically engineered foods .

There’s nothing quite like a good “whodunnit,” and students will always enjoy a good puzzle. You can base various pre-writing activities around the two games below to get the class warmed up for ESL writing practice.

Conundrum. This is an example of a game that can be played as a speaking and listening activity, and can lead into some good writing. The game starts with a simple statement or description of a situation like the ones described in situation puzzles . Students ask questions and receive yes/no answers until they work out the explanation for the situation.

After Conundrum, here are some of the activities your students can do:

58. Write a story about the sequence of events involved in a situation brought up in the game.

59. Devise and describe your own situation puzzle.

Putting their hands inside a cloth bag (or just feeling the outside) to guess what an object is.
Smelling substances in opaque jars with perforated lids, and trying to guess what they are.
Tasting mystery foods on plastic spoons (with blindfolds).
Looking at pictures of mysterious objects from obscure angles.
Listening to and guessing the origins of sound effects. (You can record your own, or use some from the Internet .)

(Important: Make sure that whatever you’re using for your guessing game is safe for your students, especially if they involve having to touch, taste or smell the object.)

After a guessing game, your students can:

60. Write about a possible mystery object and a magical quality it could possess.

61. Describe what you thought you saw, heard, felt, tasted or smelled.

For both games, here are some writing prompts you can do:

62. Give instructions for playing one of the games.

63. Give instructions for the perfect crime.

64. Give your opinion about a recent crime and the punishment for it.

Emailing can often be a scary task for your students, especially if they’re using a new, strange language like English. You can utilize an email writing activity to help your students build confidence and get more comfortable writing in English.

Email can also teach your students things like proper language (formal or informal), structure and format. Email-related writing activities for ESL students can offer ample opportunities to teach all of these three aspects.

Since emails involve two parties (the sender and the receiver), you’ll need to pair your students up for this activity. Here’s how to prepare for it:

Create one set of worksheets explaining details relevant to the sender. For example, it could contain information about a sender’s upcoming birthday party that they want to invite the receiver to.
Create another set of worksheets with the receiver’s details. The worksheets could contain questions about food dishes or gifts, or it could say that the receiver can’t make it for one reason or other.

Once the above has been done, give one set of worksheets to the “senders” and the other to the “receivers.” Then, here’s what your students will do:

65. Based on the senders’ worksheets, write an email inviting the receiver and explaining the key aspects of the event featured in the worksheet.

66. Based on the receivers’ worksheets, write an email explaining why you can or cannot make it to the party, and/or what other information you need about the event.

Advertisements are everywhere, and you can bet that your students have a few favorite ads of their own. Advertisement-related writing activities work across age groups and can be adapted to most students and their needs.

This great ESL writing assignment can help your students put the adjectives they’ve learned into good use, as well as showcase their creative writing and persuasion skills.

You can find advertisements everywhere, including:

YouTube videos
Newspapers and magazines

You can also bring an object (or handful of objects) to class that your students can write ads about.

67. After your students carefully examine the object(s) you brought into class: Write all the adjectives you can think of about it.

68. For a more challenging writing exercise: Write an ad about the object. How would you persuade someone who knows nothing about the object whatsoever to buy it? (Your students may or may not use the adjectives they wrote down earlier. Encourage them to be creative!)

Your students have likely already done some kind of report during the course of their studies. Also, writing reports is a skill that’ll be useful to them once they enter college or the corporate world (if they aren’t in it already). If you feel that they need a little more practice in this area, use this ESL writing assignment.

First, discuss how research and structure matter to reports—and perhaps show them a few samples. Then, give them a few questions to base their reports on, like:

69. What can you say about (insert topic here) in terms of (insert specific angle here)? (For example, “What can you say about the government’s efforts to improve the local park in terms of its impact on the general public?” Of course, you should adapt this question to the level of your students.)

70. After talking about a YouTube video on bears eating salmon : What would happen to the bears if the salmon ran out?

This ESL writing activity is a bit more intensive and will allow your students to employ many different aspects of their ESL knowledge. Crafting a class newsletter will build collaboration, communication, listening, speaking and, of course, writing skills. If they’re not sure how to build a newsletter or newspaper from scratch, they can always swipe from premade templates like this one .

The newsletter/newspaper can follow a specific theme, or the articles can consist of a hodgepodge of random topics based on questions like:

71. What is the most interesting thing that happened in school this year? It can be the funniest/scariest/most heartwarming incident. Write a feature article about it. (Make sure to explain what a “feature article” is .)

72. Write a report highlighting the key events in some recent local festivals or concerts.

73. Going off of the last exercise, write an ad inviting the reader to buy a product or attend an event.

Once all of the articles are done, you can start putting them together. Make sure to walk your students through these newspaper layout tips . And when the newsletter/newspaper is finally published and circulated out there for the world to see, remember to congratulate your students for a job well done!

No matter what writing assignments you choose, make sure to keep the excitement level high so that your students are enthusiastic for your next writing session.

Whether they write by hand or type on a computer, remember to encourage them as much as you can by focusing on the good points rather than just running all over their mistakes with a red pen.

Lastly, find ways for them to share their efforts—whether online, on the classroom wall, bound together in a book to be passed around, etc.

They can also read aloud to each other, share with their parents and siblings and even share with other classes!

For more ESL assignment ideas, check out this post:

Great ESL homework ideas can be difficult to come up with. So check out these 13 great ideas for ESL homework assignments that your students will love. Not only are they…

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If you’re looking for a fun group project for 4 or more kids, wacky abstract word art activity is just the ticket. Offering writing practice and grammar review, this isn’t your average art project.

Kids practice building sentences with different parts of speech, then create paintings of the silly mad-lib sentences they come up with. In an unexpected fun twist, at the end they get to rip up their paintings and arrange them into wild and unique abstract collages.

Autobiographies

In this fun project, you ask the students to detail their life history in an interesting tone. To avoid monotone, ask them to only include those events in life which they consider adventurous or unforgettable.

Ask them to highlight emotions rather than timeline.

You can add a twist to the exercise by asking them to write their ideal future life in an epilogue.

This project will focus on verbal communication skills.

Ask the students to select a book or excerpt from a book to read. You can assign a genre to keep the communication streamlined.

Students can take turns to give a short review of their reading together with their viewpoints about it. They can talk about the moral values of the characters or change endings or events to discuss if the plot becomes more entertaining with these changes.

Check out these ideas on how to run a successful Book Club !

Class Magazine

This is a perfect project for all classes in middle and high school. You can take it to the next level by asking the whole school to start a competition for the best class magazine.

You can ask your class to select a theme of environmental, health, literary, or societal topic.

Then ask them to gather all skills; idea-generation, writing, design, and presentation. You will get the most benefits if you make it mandatory for every student to produce content for one page of the magazine. (You can include the advertisement activity within the activity of class magazine.)

Comic Strip

This is another extensive project that will not only win the hearts of your students but also allow you to assess their creative capabilities.

Ask them to illustrate interesting events from their lives, or imagination, in the form of comic strips.

ALSO READ: SPEAKING ACTIVITIES FOR ANY LANGUAGE CLASS

This activity is similar to the comic activity given above. The only difference is the increased detail that is required in drama writing. An absence of images adds the obligation on the students to describe scenes and expressions.

Again, students can describe any life event from their reality or imagination.

You can later ask the students to act on the best dramas to improve their verbal and non-verbal communication.

Paper Mache Activity

In this messy yet super fun project, students make paper mache futuristic Earths or other imaginary planets as described in science fiction.

This was my cross-curricular activity based off of our Literature reading of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and a unit topic in English about the environment and recycling. Of course, you can do paper mache for any lesson or unit that you have!

This article gives you the step-by-step instruction on how to do paper mache in the classroom!

Editorial/ Fan Letter

Editorial is one of English project ideas most suitable for high-schoolers while fan letters work for learners from all English expertise levels.

Ask your high-schoolers to analyze a societal issue that is close to their heart. Next, they need to define the problem from the viewpoint of aggrieved parties. Ask them to write out the problem and get it published in a local or national newspaper.

(Be ready to proofread and edit the piece before they send it to relevant personnel.)

Younger students can write fan letters to their best actors, authors, and singers.

This is another English project which will combine societal, and practical, understanding with English learning. In this project, the students will learn problem-solving skills.

Ask them to understand a societal or scientific problem. Once they have understood and defined this issue, they have to provide a solution to this problem.

In the end, they have to present their solution together with the need which gave rise to it in front of the class. (You may want them to include a video presentation with visual effects .)

This activity is one of my students’ favorite s not only because it’s fun but also because it facilitates their learning. I tried this project on two literature readings I had before (The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe) and both achieved the same fantastic end.

In this project, students are tasked to illustrate the setting or a specific part of the book in the form of a three-dimensional miniature scene. Students will pick a favorite scene from the story they are reading and decide how they want to represent it using the materials given (above) and a variety of design strategies.

This writing exercise contains the most fun among all the given projects. You will excite their creativity as well as their inner critic.

Start by inquiring about the literary work which fascinates or inspires them most.

Ask them if they can add humor to that piece. Let them edit a single character or scene or if they want they can give a humorous outlook to the whole plot.

Fables

This open-ended English writing project will ask the students to select one event in their life. This event should be intriguing as well as contain a life lesson.

Then, they have to retell this piece in third person pronoun. Ask them to keep the tone conversational as well as engaging.

In the end, ask them to write a conclusive moral of the story.

POPULAR: 5 Project-based Learning for High School English

Self-Portrait Project

These self-portrait ideas were part of a short project that went really with my middle school ESL class so I thought I’d share them with you.

My students were able to come up with three products in one activity: a mind map, a self-portrait and an essay. The unit topic was about “Identity” or “Personality” but I guess this will work for general descriptive adjectives lesson as well.

Charts

If you want to include futuristic touch to your English lessons, include a thing or two from STEM subjects. One great way is to ask them to explain or detail a mathematical chart. (You can come up with variations in this original plan. For example, you can ask future businessmen to interpret graphics related to market studies.)

See, if they have enough vocabulary and concepts to comprehend and convey the message to their fellows.

Fictional Pen-Pals

Just like fan letters, this activity asks the students to write letters to their favorite characters in fictional and non-fictional worlds.

Ask them to pinpoint the era, region, settings they like most in a given novel or historical account. Next, they would show interest in one of its characters and the reason for this interest.

In the end, they need to write a letter to this character praising or advising him/her regarding his/her role in the piece. (You can reply on behalf of that character if you think the point made by the student inspires further dialogue.)

Book Trailer Project

Book Trailer Project is a digital storytelling activity for middle school or high school students after they finish reading a book. Students need to take the key idea from the book to create a short video that persuades people to check out a book they have read.

Doing the book trailer project requires students to summarize, synthesize and analyze the book and put that analysis in their trailer. Furthermore, having students create book trailers is a great way to incorporate technology in the classroom and encourage reading. Thus, book trailer project is a great alternative to boring book report assignments, and can easily be done individually or in groups.

So these are some of creative English project ideas you can use in your English class to prompt your students to express their creativity and language skills. These are fun, practical, and learning-inducing.

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A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Senior Contributing Editor

Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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How to Do Homework: 15 Expert Tips and Tricks

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Everyone struggles with homework sometimes, but if getting your homework done has become a chronic issue for you, then you may need a little extra help. That’s why we’ve written this article all about how to do homework. Once you’re finished reading it, you’ll know how to do homework (and have tons of new ways to motivate yourself to do homework)!

We’ve broken this article down into a few major sections. You’ll find:

A diagnostic test to help you figure out why you’re struggling with homework
A discussion of the four major homework problems students face, along with expert tips for addressing them
A bonus section with tips for how to do homework fast

By the end of this article, you’ll be prepared to tackle whatever homework assignments your teachers throw at you .

So let’s get started!

How to Do Homework: Figure Out Your Struggles

Sometimes it feels like everything is standing between you and getting your homework done. But the truth is, most people only have one or two major roadblocks that are keeping them from getting their homework done well and on time.

The best way to figure out how to get motivated to do homework starts with pinpointing the issues that are affecting your ability to get your assignments done. That’s why we’ve developed a short quiz to help you identify the areas where you’re struggling.

Take the quiz below and record your answers on your phone or on a scrap piece of paper. Keep in mind there are no wrong answers!

1. You’ve just been assigned an essay in your English class that’s due at the end of the week. What’s the first thing you do?

A. Keep it in mind, even though you won’t start it until the day before it’s due B. Open up your planner. You’ve got to figure out when you’ll write your paper since you have band practice, a speech tournament, and your little sister’s dance recital this week, too. C. Groan out loud. Another essay? You could barely get yourself to write the last one! D. Start thinking about your essay topic, which makes you think about your art project that’s due the same day, which reminds you that your favorite artist might have just posted to Instagram...so you better check your feed right now.

2. Your mom asked you to pick up your room before she gets home from work. You’ve just gotten home from school. You decide you’ll tackle your chores:

A. Five minutes before your mom walks through the front door. As long as it gets done, who cares when you start? B. As soon as you get home from your shift at the local grocery store. C. After you give yourself a 15-minute pep talk about how you need to get to work. D. You won’t get it done. Between texts from your friends, trying to watch your favorite Netflix show, and playing with your dog, you just lost track of time!

3. You’ve signed up to wash dogs at the Humane Society to help earn money for your senior class trip. You:

A. Show up ten minutes late. You put off leaving your house until the last minute, then got stuck in unexpected traffic on the way to the shelter. B. Have to call and cancel at the last minute. You forgot you’d already agreed to babysit your cousin and bake cupcakes for tomorrow’s bake sale. C. Actually arrive fifteen minutes early with extra brushes and bandanas you picked up at the store. You’re passionate about animals, so you’re excited to help out! D. Show up on time, but only get three dogs washed. You couldn’t help it: you just kept getting distracted by how cute they were!

4. You have an hour of downtime, so you decide you’re going to watch an episode of The Great British Baking Show. You:

A. Scroll through your social media feeds for twenty minutes before hitting play, which means you’re not able to finish the whole episode. Ugh! You really wanted to see who was sent home! B. Watch fifteen minutes until you remember you’re supposed to pick up your sister from band practice before heading to your part-time job. No GBBO for you! C. You finish one episode, then decide to watch another even though you’ve got SAT studying to do. It’s just more fun to watch people make scones. D. Start the episode, but only catch bits and pieces of it because you’re reading Twitter, cleaning out your backpack, and eating a snack at the same time.

5. Your teacher asks you to stay after class because you’ve missed turning in two homework assignments in a row. When she asks you what’s wrong, you say:

A. You planned to do your assignments during lunch, but you ran out of time. You decided it would be better to turn in nothing at all than submit unfinished work. B. You really wanted to get the assignments done, but between your extracurriculars, family commitments, and your part-time job, your homework fell through the cracks. C. You have a hard time psyching yourself to tackle the assignments. You just can’t seem to find the motivation to work on them once you get home. D. You tried to do them, but you had a hard time focusing. By the time you realized you hadn’t gotten anything done, it was already time to turn them in.

Like we said earlier, there are no right or wrong answers to this quiz (though your results will be better if you answered as honestly as possible). Here’s how your answers break down:

If your answers were mostly As, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is procrastination.
If your answers were mostly Bs, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is time management.
If your answers were mostly Cs, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is motivation.
If your answers were mostly Ds, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is getting distracted.

Now that you’ve identified why you’re having a hard time getting your homework done, we can help you figure out how to fix it! Scroll down to find your core problem area to learn more about how you can start to address it.

And one more thing: you’re really struggling with homework, it’s a good idea to read through every section below. You may find some additional tips that will help make homework less intimidating.

How to Do Homework When You’re a Procrastinator

Merriam Webster defines “procrastinate” as “to put off intentionally and habitually.” In other words, procrastination is when you choose to do something at the last minute on a regular basis. If you’ve ever found yourself pulling an all-nighter, trying to finish an assignment between periods, or sprinting to turn in a paper minutes before a deadline, you’ve experienced the effects of procrastination.

If you’re a chronic procrastinator, you’re in good company. In fact, one study found that 70% to 95% of undergraduate students procrastinate when it comes to doing their homework. Unfortunately, procrastination can negatively impact your grades. Researchers have found that procrastination can lower your grade on an assignment by as much as five points ...which might not sound serious until you realize that can mean the difference between a B- and a C+.

Procrastination can also negatively affect your health by increasing your stress levels , which can lead to other health conditions like insomnia, a weakened immune system, and even heart conditions. Getting a handle on procrastination can not only improve your grades, it can make you feel better, too!

The big thing to understand about procrastination is that it’s not the result of laziness. Laziness is defined as being “disinclined to activity or exertion.” In other words, being lazy is all about doing nothing. But a s this Psychology Today article explains , procrastinators don’t put things off because they don’t want to work. Instead, procrastinators tend to postpone tasks they don’t want to do in favor of tasks that they perceive as either more important or more fun. Put another way, procrastinators want to do things...as long as it’s not their homework!

3 Tips f or Conquering Procrastination

Because putting off doing homework is a common problem, there are lots of good tactics for addressing procrastination. Keep reading for our three expert tips that will get your homework habits back on track in no time.

#1: Create a Reward System

Like we mentioned earlier, procrastination happens when you prioritize other activities over getting your homework done. Many times, this happens because homework...well, just isn’t enjoyable. But you can add some fun back into the process by rewarding yourself for getting your work done.

Here’s what we mean: let’s say you decide that every time you get your homework done before the day it’s due, you’ll give yourself a point. For every five points you earn, you’ll treat yourself to your favorite dessert: a chocolate cupcake! Now you have an extra (delicious!) incentive to motivate you to leave procrastination in the dust.

If you’re not into cupcakes, don’t worry. Your reward can be anything that motivates you . Maybe it’s hanging out with your best friend or an extra ten minutes of video game time. As long as you’re choosing something that makes homework worth doing, you’ll be successful.

#2: Have a Homework Accountability Partner

If you’re having trouble getting yourself to start your homework ahead of time, it may be a good idea to call in reinforcements . Find a friend or classmate you can trust and explain to them that you’re trying to change your homework habits. Ask them if they’d be willing to text you to make sure you’re doing your homework and check in with you once a week to see if you’re meeting your anti-procrastination goals.

Sharing your goals can make them feel more real, and an accountability partner can help hold you responsible for your decisions. For example, let’s say you’re tempted to put off your science lab write-up until the morning before it’s due. But you know that your accountability partner is going to text you about it tomorrow...and you don’t want to fess up that you haven’t started your assignment. A homework accountability partner can give you the extra support and incentive you need to keep your homework habits on track.

#3: Create Your Own Due Dates

If you’re a life-long procrastinator, you might find that changing the habit is harder than you expected. In that case, you might try using procrastination to your advantage! If you just can’t seem to stop doing your work at the last minute, try setting your own due dates for assignments that range from a day to a week before the assignment is actually due.

Here’s what we mean. Let’s say you have a math worksheet that’s been assigned on Tuesday and is due on Friday. In your planner, you can write down the due date as Thursday instead. You may still put off your homework assignment until the last minute...but in this case, the “last minute” is a day before the assignment’s real due date . This little hack can trick your procrastination-addicted brain into planning ahead!

If you feel like Kevin Hart in this meme, then our tips for doing homework when you're busy are for you.

How to Do Homework When You’re too Busy

If you’re aiming to go to a top-tier college , you’re going to have a full plate. Because college admissions is getting more competitive, it’s important that you’re maintaining your grades , studying hard for your standardized tests , and participating in extracurriculars so your application stands out. A packed schedule can get even more hectic once you add family obligations or a part-time job to the mix.

If you feel like you’re being pulled in a million directions at once, you’re not alone. Recent research has found that stress—and more severe stress-related conditions like anxiety and depression— are a major problem for high school students . In fact, one study from the American Psychological Association found that during the school year, students’ stress levels are higher than those of the adults around them.

For students, homework is a major contributor to their overall stress levels . Many high schoolers have multiple hours of homework every night , and figuring out how to fit it into an already-packed schedule can seem impossible.

3 Tips for Fitting Homework Into Your Busy Schedule

While it might feel like you have literally no time left in your schedule, there are still ways to make sure you’re able to get your homework done and meet your other commitments. Here are our expert homework tips for even the busiest of students.

#1: Make a Prioritized To-Do List

You probably already have a to-do list to keep yourself on track. The next step is to prioritize the items on your to-do list so you can see what items need your attention right away.

Here’s how it works: at the beginning of each day, sit down and make a list of all the items you need to get done before you go to bed. This includes your homework, but it should also take into account any practices, chores, events, or job shifts you may have. Once you get everything listed out, it’s time to prioritize them using the labels A, B, and C. Here’s what those labels mean:

A Tasks : tasks that have to get done—like showing up at work or turning in an assignment—get an A.
B Tasks : these are tasks that you would like to get done by the end of the day but aren’t as time sensitive. For example, studying for a test you have next week could be a B-level task. It’s still important, but it doesn’t have to be done right away.
C Tasks: these are tasks that aren’t very important and/or have no real consequences if you don’t get them done immediately. For instance, if you’re hoping to clean out your closet but it’s not an assigned chore from your parents, you could label that to-do item with a C.

Prioritizing your to-do list helps you visualize which items need your immediate attention, and which items you can leave for later. A prioritized to-do list ensures that you’re spending your time efficiently and effectively, which helps you make room in your schedule for homework. So even though you might really want to start making decorations for Homecoming (a B task), you’ll know that finishing your reading log (an A task) is more important.

#2: Use a Planner With Time Labels

Your planner is probably packed with notes, events, and assignments already. (And if you’re not using a planner, it’s time to start!) But planners can do more for you than just remind you when an assignment is due. If you’re using a planner with time labels, it can help you visualize how you need to spend your day.

A planner with time labels breaks your day down into chunks, and you assign tasks to each chunk of time. For example, you can make a note of your class schedule with assignments, block out time to study, and make sure you know when you need to be at practice. Once you know which tasks take priority, you can add them to any empty spaces in your day.

Planning out how you spend your time not only helps you use it wisely, it can help you feel less overwhelmed, too . We’re big fans of planners that include a task list ( like this one ) or have room for notes ( like this one ).

#3: Set Reminders on Your Phone

If you need a little extra nudge to make sure you’re getting your homework done on time, it’s a good idea to set some reminders on your phone. You don’t need a fancy app, either. You can use your alarm app to have it go off at specific times throughout the day to remind you to do your homework. This works especially well if you have a set homework time scheduled. So if you’ve decided you’re doing homework at 6:00 pm, you can set an alarm to remind you to bust out your books and get to work.

If you use your phone as your planner, you may have the option to add alerts, emails, or notifications to scheduled events . Many calendar apps, including the one that comes with your phone, have built-in reminders that you can customize to meet your needs. So if you block off time to do your homework from 4:30 to 6:00 pm, you can set a reminder that will pop up on your phone when it’s time to get started.

This dog isn't judging your lack of motivation...but your teacher might. Keep reading for tips to help you motivate yourself to do your homework.

How to Do Homework When You’re Unmotivated

At first glance, it may seem like procrastination and being unmotivated are the same thing. After all, both of these issues usually result in you putting off your homework until the very last minute.

But there’s one key difference: many procrastinators are working, they’re just prioritizing work differently. They know they’re going to start their homework...they’re just going to do it later.

Conversely, people who are unmotivated to do homework just can’t find the willpower to tackle their assignments. Procrastinators know they’ll at least attempt the homework at the last minute, whereas people who are unmotivated struggle with convincing themselves to do it at a ll. For procrastinators, the stress comes from the inevitable time crunch. For unmotivated people, the stress comes from trying to convince themselves to do something they don’t want to do in the first place.

Here are some common reasons students are unmotivated in doing homework :

Assignments are too easy, too hard, or seemingly pointless
Students aren’t interested in (or passionate about) the subject matter
Students are intimidated by the work and/or feels like they don’t understand the assignment
Homework isn’t fun, and students would rather spend their time on things that they enjoy

To sum it up: people who lack motivation to do their homework are more likely to not do it at all, or to spend more time worrying about doing their homework than...well, actually doing it.

3 Tips for How to Get Motivated to Do Homework

The key to getting homework done when you’re unmotivated is to figure out what does motivate you, then apply those things to homework. It sounds tricky...but it’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it! Here are our three expert tips for motivating yourself to do your homework.

#1: Use Incremental Incentives

When you’re not motivated, it’s important to give yourself small rewards to stay focused on finishing the task at hand. The trick is to keep the incentives small and to reward yourself often. For example, maybe you’re reading a good book in your free time. For every ten minutes you spend on your homework, you get to read five pages of your book. Like we mentioned earlier, make sure you’re choosing a reward that works for you!

So why does this technique work? Using small rewards more often allows you to experience small wins for getting your work done. Every time you make it to one of your tiny reward points, you get to celebrate your success, which gives your brain a boost of dopamine . Dopamine helps you stay motivated and also creates a feeling of satisfaction when you complete your homework !

#2: Form a Homework Group

If you’re having trouble motivating yourself, it’s okay to turn to others for support. Creating a homework group can help with this. Bring together a group of your friends or classmates, and pick one time a week where you meet and work on homework together. You don’t have to be in the same class, or even taking the same subjects— the goal is to encourage one another to start (and finish!) your assignments.

Another added benefit of a homework group is that you can help one another if you’re struggling to understand the material covered in your classes. This is especially helpful if your lack of motivation comes from being intimidated by your assignments. Asking your friends for help may feel less scary than talking to your teacher...and once you get a handle on the material, your homework may become less frightening, too.

#3: Change Up Your Environment

If you find that you’re totally unmotivated, it may help if you find a new place to do your homework. For example, if you’ve been struggling to get your homework done at home, try spending an extra hour in the library after school instead. The change of scenery can limit your distractions and give you the energy you need to get your work done.

If you’re stuck doing homework at home, you can still use this tip. For instance, maybe you’ve always done your homework sitting on your bed. Try relocating somewhere else, like your kitchen table, for a few weeks. You may find that setting up a new “homework spot” in your house gives you a motivational lift and helps you get your work done.

Social media can be a huge problem when it comes to doing homework. We have advice for helping you unplug and regain focus.

How to Do Homework When You’re Easily Distracted

We live in an always-on world, and there are tons of things clamoring for our attention. From friends and family to pop culture and social media, it seems like there’s always something (or someone!) distracting us from the things we need to do.

The 24/7 world we live in has affected our ability to focus on tasks for prolonged periods of time. Research has shown that over the past decade, an average person’s attention span has gone from 12 seconds to eight seconds . And when we do lose focus, i t takes people a long time to get back on task . One study found that it can take as long as 23 minutes to get back to work once we’ve been distracte d. No wonder it can take hours to get your homework done!

3 Tips to Improve Your Focus

If you have a hard time focusing when you’re doing your homework, it’s a good idea to try and eliminate as many distractions as possible. Here are three expert tips for blocking out the noise so you can focus on getting your homework done.

#1: Create a Distraction-Free Environment

Pick a place where you’ll do your homework every day, and make it as distraction-free as possible. Try to find a location where there won’t be tons of noise, and limit your access to screens while you’re doing your homework. Put together a focus-oriented playlist (or choose one on your favorite streaming service), and put your headphones on while you work.

You may find that other people, like your friends and family, are your biggest distraction. If that’s the case, try setting up some homework boundaries. Let them know when you’ll be working on homework every day, and ask them if they’ll help you keep a quiet environment. They’ll be happy to lend a hand!

#2: Limit Your Access to Technology

We know, we know...this tip isn’t fun, but it does work. For homework that doesn’t require a computer, like handouts or worksheets, it’s best to put all your technology away . Turn off your television, put your phone and laptop in your backpack, and silence notifications on any wearable tech you may be sporting. If you listen to music while you work, that’s fine...but make sure you have a playlist set up so you’re not shuffling through songs once you get started on your homework.

If your homework requires your laptop or tablet, it can be harder to limit your access to distractions. But it’s not impossible! T here are apps you can download that will block certain websites while you’re working so that you’re not tempted to scroll through Twitter or check your Facebook feed. Silence notifications and text messages on your computer, and don’t open your email account unless you absolutely have to. And if you don’t need access to the internet to complete your assignments, turn off your WiFi. Cutting out the online chatter is a great way to make sure you’re getting your homework done.

#3: Set a Timer (the Pomodoro Technique)

Have you ever heard of the Pomodoro technique ? It’s a productivity hack that uses a timer to help you focus!

Here’s how it works: first, set a timer for 25 minutes. This is going to be your work time. During this 25 minutes, all you can do is work on whatever homework assignment you have in front of you. No email, no text messaging, no phone calls—just homework. When that timer goes off, you get to take a 5 minute break. Every time you go through one of these cycles, it’s called a “pomodoro.” For every four pomodoros you complete, you can take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.

The pomodoro technique works through a combination of boundary setting and rewards. First, it gives you a finite amount of time to focus, so you know that you only have to work really hard for 25 minutes. Once you’ve done that, you’re rewarded with a short break where you can do whatever you want. Additionally, tracking how many pomodoros you complete can help you see how long you’re really working on your homework. (Once you start using our focus tips, you may find it doesn’t take as long as you thought!)

Two Bonus Tips for How to Do Homework Fast

Even if you’re doing everything right, there will be times when you just need to get your homework done as fast as possible. (Why do teachers always have projects due in the same week? The world may never know.)

The problem with speeding through homework is that it’s easy to make mistakes. While turning in an assignment is always better than not submitting anything at all, you want to make sure that you’re not compromising quality for speed. Simply put, the goal is to get your homework done quickly and still make a good grade on the assignment!

Here are our two bonus tips for getting a decent grade on your homework assignments , even when you’re in a time crunch.

#1: Do the Easy Parts First

This is especially true if you’re working on a handout with multiple questions. Before you start working on the assignment, read through all the questions and problems. As you do, make a mark beside the questions you think are “easy” to answer .

Once you’ve finished going through the whole assignment, you can answer these questions first. Getting the easy questions out of the way as quickly as possible lets you spend more time on the trickier portions of your homework, which will maximize your assignment grade.

(Quick note: this is also a good strategy to use on timed assignments and tests, like the SAT and the ACT !)

#2: Pay Attention in Class

Homework gets a lot easier when you’re actively learning the material. Teachers aren’t giving you homework because they’re mean or trying to ruin your weekend... it’s because they want you to really understand the course material. Homework is designed to reinforce what you’re already learning in class so you’ll be ready to tackle harder concepts later.

When you pay attention in class, ask questions, and take good notes, you’re absorbing the information you’ll need to succeed on your homework assignments. (You’re stuck in class anyway, so you might as well make the most of it!) Not only will paying attention in class make your homework less confusing, it will also help it go much faster, too.

What’s Next?

If you’re looking to improve your productivity beyond homework, a good place to begin is with time management. After all, we only have so much time in a day...so it’s important to get the most out of it! To get you started, check out this list of the 12 best time management techniques that you can start using today.

You may have read this article because homework struggles have been affecting your GPA. Now that you’re on the path to homework success, it’s time to start being proactive about raising your grades. This article teaches you everything you need to know about raising your GPA so you can

Now you know how to get motivated to do homework...but what about your study habits? Studying is just as critical to getting good grades, and ultimately getting into a good college . We can teach you how to study bette r in high school. (We’ve also got tons of resources to help you study for your ACT and SAT exams , too!)

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

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Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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5 Ways to Make Homework More Meaningful

Use these insights from educators—and research—to create homework practices that work for everyone.

Homework tends to be a polarizing topic. While many teachers advocate for its complete elimination, others argue that it provides students with the extra practice they need to solidify their learning and teach them work habits—like managing time and meeting deadlines—that have lifelong benefits.

We recently reached out to teachers in our audience to identify practices that can help educators plot a middle path.

On Facebook , elementary school teacher John Thomas responded that the best homework is often no-strings-attached encouragement to read or play academically adjacent games with family members. “I encourage reading every night,” Thomas said, but he doesn’t use logs or other means of getting students to track their completion. “Just encouragement and book bags with self selected books students take home for enjoyment.”

Thomas said he also suggests to parents and students that they can play around with “math and science tools” such as “calculators, tape measures, protractors, rulers, money, tangrams, and building blocks.” Math-based games like Yahtzee or dominoes can also serve as enriching—and fun—practice of skills they’re learning.

At the middle and high school level, homework generally increases, and that can be demotivating for teachers, who feel obliged to review or even grade halfhearted submissions. Student morale is at stake, too: “Most [students] don’t complete it anyway,” said high school teacher Krystn Stretzinger Charlie on Facebook . “It ends up hurting them more than it helps.”

So how do teachers decide when to—and when not to—assign homework, and how do they ensure that the homework they assign feels meaningful, productive, and even motivating to students?

1. Less is More

A 2017 study analyzed the homework assignments of more than 20,000 middle and high school students and found that teachers are often a bad judge of how long homework will take.

According to researchers, students spend as much as 85 minutes or as little as 30 minutes on homework that teachers imagined would take students one hour to complete. The researchers concluded that by assigning too much homework , teachers actually increased inequalities between students in exchange for “minimal gains in achievement.” Too much homework can overwhelm students who “have more gaps in their knowledge,” the researchers said, and creates situations where homework becomes so time-consuming and frustrating that it turns students off to classwork more broadly.

To counteract this, middle school math teacher Crystal Frommert said she focuses on quality over quantity. Frommert cited the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics , which recommends only assigning “what’s necessary to augment instruction” and adds that if teachers can “get sufficient information by assigning only five problems, then don’t assign fifty.”

Instead of sending students home with worksheets and long problem sets from textbooks that often repeat the same concepts, Frommert recommended assigning part of a page, or even a few specific problems—and explaining to students why these handpicked problems will be helpful practice. When students know there’s thought behind the problems they’re asked to solve at home, “they pay more attention to the condensed assignment because it was tailored for them,” Frommert said.

On Instagram , high school teacher Jacob Palmer said that every now and then he condenses homework down to just one problem that is particularly engaging and challenging: “The depth and exploration that can come from one single problem can be richer than 20 routine problems.”

2. Add Choice to the Equation

Former educator and coach Mike Anderson said teachers can differentiate homework assignments without placing unrealistic demands on their workload by offering students some discretion in the work they complete and explicitly teaching them “how to choose appropriately challenging work for themselves.”

Instead of assigning the same 20 problems or response questions on a given textbook page to all students, for example, Anderson suggested asking students to refer to the list of questions and choose and complete a designated number of them (three to five, for example) that give students “a little bit of a challenge but that [they] can still solve independently.”

To teach students how to choose well, Anderson has students practice choosing homework questions in class before the end of the day, brainstorming in groups and sharing their thoughts about what a good homework question should accomplish. The other part, of course, involves offering students good choices: “Make sure that options for homework focus on the skills being practiced and are open-ended enough for all students to be successful,” he said.

Once students have developed a better understanding of the purpose of challenging themselves to practice and grow as learners, Anderson also periodically asks them to come up with their own ideas for problems or other activities they can use to reinforce learning at home. A simple question, such as “What are some ideas for how you might practice this skill at home?” can be enough to get students sharing ideas, he said.

Jill Kibler, a former high school science teacher, told Edutopia on Facebook that she implemented homework choice in her classroom by allowing students to decide how much of the work they’ve recently turned in that they’d like to redo as homework: “Students had one grading cycle (about seven school days) to redo the work they wanted to improve,” she said.

3. Break the Mold

According to high school English teacher Kate Dusto, the work that students produce at home doesn’t have to come in the traditional formats of written responses to a problem. On Instagram , Dusto told Edutopia that homework can often be made more interesting—and engaging—by allowing students to show evidence of their learning in creative ways.

“Offer choices for how they show their learning,” Dusto said. “Record audio or video? Type or use speech to text? Draw or handwrite and then upload a picture?” The possibilities are endless.

Former educator and author Jay McTighe noted that visual representations such as graphic organizers and concept maps are particularly useful for students attempting to organize new information and solidify their understanding of abstract concepts. For example, students might be asked to “draw a visual web of factors affecting plant growth” in biology class or map out the plot, characters, themes, and settings of a novel or play they’re reading to visualize relationships between different elements of the story and deepen their comprehension of it.

Simple written responses to summarize new learning can also be made more interesting by varying the format, McTighe said. For example, ask students to compose a tweet in 280 characters or less to answer a question like “What is the big idea that you have learned about _____?” or even record a short audio podcast or video podcast explaining “key concepts from one or more lessons.”

4. Make Homework Voluntary

When elementary school teacher Jacqueline Worthley Fiorentino stopped assigning mandatory homework to her second-grade students and suggested voluntary activities instead, she found that something surprising happened: “They started doing more work at home.”

Some of the simple, voluntary activities she presented students with included encouraging at-home reading (without mandating how much time they should spend reading); sending home weekly spelling words and math facts that will be covered in class but that should also be mastered by the end of the week: “It will be up to each child to figure out the best way to learn to spell the words correctly or to master the math facts,” she said; and creating voluntary lesson extensions such as pointing students to outside resources—texts, videos or films, webpages, or even online or in-person exhibits—to “expand their knowledge on a topic covered in class.”

Anderson said that for older students, teachers can sometimes make whatever homework they assign a voluntary choice. “Do all students need to practice a skill? If not, you might keep homework invitational,” he said, adding that teachers can tell students, “If you think a little more practice tonight would help you solidify your learning, here are some examples you might try.”

On Facebook , Natisha Wilson, a K–12 gifted students coordinator for an Ohio school district, said that when students are working on a challenging question in class, she’ll give them the option to “take it home and figure it out” if they’re unable to complete it before the end of the period. Often students take her up on this, she said, because many of them “can’t stand not knowing the answer.”

5. Grade for Completion—or Don’t Grade at All

Former teacher Rick Wormeli argued that work on homework assignments isn’t “evidence of final level of proficiency”; rather, it’s practice that provides teachers with “feedback and informs where we go next in instruction.”

Grading homework for completion—or not grading at all, Wormeli said—can help students focus on the real task at hand of consolidating understanding and self-monitoring their learning. “When early attempts at mastery are not used against them, and accountability comes in the form of actually learning content, adolescents flourish.”

High school science teacher John Scali agreed , confirming that grading for “completion and timeliness” rather than for “correctness” makes students “more likely to do the work, especially if it ties directly into what we are doing in class the next day” without worrying about being “100% correct.” On Instagram , middle school math teacher Traci Hawks noted that any assignments that are completed and show work—even if the answer is wrong—gets a 100 from her.

But Frommert said that even grading for completion can be time-consuming for teachers and fraught for students if they don’t have home environments that are supportive of homework or if they have jobs or other after-school activities.

Instead of traditional grading, she suggested alternatives to holding students accountable for homework, such as student presentations or even group discussions and debates as a way to check for understanding. For example, students can debate which method is best to solve a problem or discuss their prospective solutions in small groups. “Communicating their mathematical thinking deepens their understanding,” Frommert said.

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (for Elementary Levels A2)

English Stories to improve English – “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” Free Download

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

By Lewis Carroll

Retold by Jennifer Bassett

Chapter one: Down the rabbit-hole

Chapter two: the pool of tears, chapter three: conversation with a caterpillar, chapter four: the cheshire cat, chapter five: a mad tea-party, chapter six: the queen’s game of croquet, chapter seven: who stole the tarts.

Alice was beginning to get very bored. She and her sister were sitting under the trees. Her sister was reading, but Alice had nothing to do. Once or twice she looked into her sister’s book, but it had no pictures or conversations in it.

‘And what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’

She tried to think of something to do, but it was a hot day and she felt very sleepy and stupid. She was still sitting and thinking when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran past her.

Suddenly a White Rabbit ran past her

There was nothing really strange about seeing a rabbit. And Alice was not very surprised when the Rabbit said, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!’ (Perhaps it was a little strange, Alice thought later, but at the time she was not surprised.)

But then the Rabbit took a watch out of its pocket, looked at it, and hurried on. At once Alice jumped to her feet.

‘I’ve never before seen a rabbit with either a pocket, or a watch to take out of it,’ she thought. And she ran quickly across the field after the Rabbit. She did not stop to think, and when the Rabbit ran down a large rabbit-hole, Alice followed it immediately.

After a little way the rabbit-hole suddenly went down, deep into the ground. Alice could not stop herself falling, and down she went, too.

It was a very strange hole. Alice was falling very slowly, and she had time to think and to look around her. She could see nothing below her because it was so dark. But when she looked at the sides of the hole, she could see cupboards and books and pictures on the walls. She had time to take things out of a cupboard, look at them, and then put them back in a cupboard lower down.

‘Well!’ thought Alice. ‘After a fall like this, I can fall anywhere! I can fall downstairs at home, and I won’t cry or say a word about it!’

Down, down, down. ‘How far have I fallen now?’ Alice said aloud to herself. ‘Perhaps I’m near the centre of the earth. Let me think … That’s four thousand miles down.’ (Alice was very good at her school lessons and could remember a lot of things like this.)

Down, down, down. Would she ever stop falling? Alice was very nearly asleep when, suddenly, she was sitting on the ground. Quickly, she jumped to her feet and looked around. She could see the White Rabbit, who was hurrying away and still talking to himself. ‘Oh my ears and whiskers!’ he was saying. ‘How late it’s getting!’

Alice ran after him like the wind. She was getting very near him when he suddenly turned a corner. Alice ran round the corner too, and then stopped. She was now in a long, dark room with doors all round the walls, and she could not see the White Rabbit anywhere.

She tried to open the doors, but they were all locked. ‘How will I ever get out again?’ she thought sadly. Then she saw a little glass table with three legs, and on the top of it was a very small gold key. Alice quickly took the key and tried it in all the doors, but oh dear! Either the locks were too big, or the key was too small, but she could not open any of the doors.

Then she saw another door, a door that was only forty centimetres high. The little gold key unlocked this door easily, but of course Alice could not get through it – she was much too big. So she lay on the floor and looked through the open door, into a beautiful garden with green trees and bright flowers.

Poor Alice was very unhappy. ‘What a wonderful garden!’ she said to herself. ‘I’d like to be out there – not in this dark room. Why can’t I get smaller?’ It was already a very strange day, and Alice was beginning to think that anything was possible.

After a while she locked the door again, got up and went back to the glass table. She put the key down and then she saw a little bottle on the table (‘I’m sure it wasn’t here before,’ said Alice). Round the neck of the bottle was a piece of paper with the words DRINK ME in large letters.

But Alice was a careful girl. ‘It can be dangerous to drink out of strange bottles,’ she said. ‘What will it do to me?’ She drank a little bit very slowly. The taste was very nice, like chocolate and oranges and hot sweet coffee, and very soon Alice finished the bottle.

‘What a strange feeling!’ said Alice. ‘I think I’m getting smaller and smaller every second.’

And she was. A few minutes later she was only twenty- five centimetres high. ‘And now,’ she said happily, ‘I can get through the little door into that beautiful garden.’

She ran at once to the door. When she got there, she remembered that the little gold key was back on the glass table. She ran back to the table for it, but of course, she was now much too small! There was the key, high above her, on top of the table. She tried very hard to climb up the table leg, but she could not do it.

At last, tired and unhappy, Alice sat down on the floor and cried. But after a while she spoke to herself angrily.

‘Come now,’ she said. ‘Stop crying at once. What’s the use of crying?’ She was a strange child, and often talked to herself like this.

Soon she saw a little glass box near her on the floor. She opened it, and found a very small cake with the words EAT ME on it.

Nothing could surprise Alice now. ‘Well, I’ll eat it,’ she said. ‘If I get taller, I can take the key off the table. And if I get smaller, I can get under the door. One way or another, I’ll get into the garden. So it doesn’t matter what happens!’

Alice tried very hard to climb up the table leg.

She ate a bit of the cake, and then put her hand on top of her head. ‘Which way? Which way?’ she asked herself, a little afraid. Nothing happened. This was not really surprising. People don’t usually get taller or shorter when they eat cake. But a lot of strange things were happening to Alice today. ‘It will be very boring,’ she said, ‘if nothing happens.’

So she went on eating, and very soon the cake was finished.

Curiouser and curiouser!’ said Alice. (She was very surprised, and for a minute she forgot how to speak good English.)

‘I shall be as tall as a house in a minute,’ she said. She tried to look down at her feet, and could only just see them. ‘Goodbye, feet!’ she called. ‘Who will put on your shoes now? Oh dear! What nonsense I’m talking!’

Just then her head hit the ceiling of the room. She was now about three metres high. Quickly, she took the little gold key from the table and hurried to the garden door.

Poor Alice! She lay on the floor and looked into the garden with one eye. She could not even put her head through the door.

She began to cry again, and went on crying and crying. The tears ran down her face, and soon there was a large pool of water all around her on the floor. Suddenly she heard a voice, and she stopped crying to listen.

‘Oh, the Duchess, the Duchess! She’ll be so angry! I’m late, and she’s waiting for me. Oh dear, oh dear!’

It was the White Rabbit again. He was hurrying down the long room, with some white gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other hand.

Alice was afraid, but she needed help. She spoke in a quiet voice. ‘Oh, please, sir—’

The Rabbit jumped wildly, dropped the gloves and the fan, and hurried away as fast as he could.

Alice picked up the fan and the gloves. The room was very hot, so she began to fan herself while she talked. ‘Oh dear! How strange everything is today! Did I change in the night? Am I a different person today? But if I’m a different person, then the next question is – who am I? Ah, that’s the mystery.’

The Rabbit jumped wildly, and dropped the gloves and the fan.

She began to feel very unhappy again, but then she looked down at her hand. She was wearing one of the Rabbit’s white gloves. ‘How did I get it on my hand?’ she thought. ‘Oh, I’m getting smaller again!’ She looked round the room. ‘I’m already less than a metre high. And getting smaller every second! How can I stop it?’ She saw the fan in her other hand, and quickly dropped it.

She was now very, very small – and the little garden door was locked again, and the little gold key was lying on the glass table.

‘Things are worse than ever,’ thought poor Alice. She turned away from the door, and fell into salt water, right up to her neck. At first she thought it was the sea, but then she saw it was the pool of tears. Her tears. Crying makes a lot of tears when you are three metres tall.

‘Oh, why did I cry so much?’ said Alice. She swam around and looked for a way out, but the pool was very big. Just then she saw an animal in the water near her. It looked like a large animal to Alice, but it was only a mouse.

‘Shall I speak to it?’ thought Alice. ‘Everything’s very strange down here, so perhaps a mouse can talk.’

So she began: ‘Oh Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming, oh Mouse!’ (Alice did not know if this was the right way to speak to a mouse. But she wanted to be polite.)

The mouse looked at her with its little eyes, but it said nothing.

‘Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,’ thought Alice. ‘Perhaps it’s a French mouse.’ So she began again, and said in French: ‘Where is my cat?’ (This was the first sentence in her French lesson-book.)

It looked like a large animal to Alice, but it was only a mouse.

The mouse jumped half out of the water and looked at her angrily.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ cried Alice quickly. ‘Of course, you don’t like cats, do you?’

‘Like cats?’ cried the mouse in a high, angry voice. ‘Does any mouse like cats?’

‘Well, perhaps not,’ Alice began kindly.

But the mouse was now swimming quickly away, and soon Alice was alone again. At last she found her way out of the pool and sat down on the ground. She felt very lonely and unhappy. But after a while the White Rabbit came past again, looking for his white gloves and his fan.

‘The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my ears and whiskers! She’ll cut my head off, I know she will! Oh, where did I drop my gloves?’ Then he saw Alice. ‘Why, Mary Ann, what are you doing here? Run home at once, and bring me some gloves and a fan. Quick, now!’

Alice hurried away. ‘But where is his house?’ she thought while she ran. Strangely, she was no longer in the long room with the little door, but outside in a wood. She ran and ran but could not see a house anywhere, so she sat down under a flower to rest.

“Now,’ Alice said to herself. ‘First, I must get a little bigger, and second, I must find my way into that beautiful garden. I think that will be the best plan. But oh dear! How shall I get bigger? Perhaps I must eat or drink something, but the question is, what?’

Alice looked all around her at the flowers and the trees, but she could not see anything to eat. Then she saw a large mushroom near her. It was as tall as she was. She walked across to look at it, and there, on top of the mushroom, was a large caterpillar, smoking a pipe. After a while, the Caterpillar took the pipe out of its mouth and said to Alice in a slow, sleepy voice, ‘Who are you?’

‘I don’t really know, sir,’ said Alice. ‘I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I have changed so often since then. I think I am a different person now.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar. ‘Explain yourself!’

‘I can’t explain myself, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you know.’

‘I don’t know,’ said the Caterpillar.

‘Explain yourself!’ said the Caterpillar.

‘It’s difficult to describe,’ Alice replied politely. ‘One minute I’m very small, the next minute I’m as tall as a house, then I’m small again. Usually, I stay the same all day, and changing so often feels very strange to me.’

‘You!’ said the Caterpillar, in a very unfriendly voice. ‘Who are you?’

They were now back at the beginning of their conversation, which was not very helpful. Alice felt a little cross and decided to walk away.

‘Come back!’ the Caterpillar called after her. ‘I’ve something important to say.’

This sounded better, so Alice turned back.

‘Never get angry,’ said the Caterpillar.

‘Is that all?’ said Alice, trying not to be angry.

‘No,’ said the Caterpillar. For some minutes it smoked its pipe and did not speak, but at last it took the pipe out of its mouth, and said, ‘So you’ve changed, have you? How tall do you want to be?’

‘I would like to be a little larger, sir, please,’ said Alice. ‘Eight centimetres is really very small.’

For a while the Caterpillar smoked its pipe. Then it shook itself, got down off the mushroom, and moved slowly away into the grass. It did not look back at Alice, but said, ‘One side will make you taller, and the other side will make you shorter.’

‘One side of what?’ thought Alice to herself.

She did not say this aloud, but the Caterpillar said, ‘Of the mushroom.’ Then it moved away into the wood.

Alice looked at the mushroom carefully, but it was round, and did not have sides. At last she broke off a piece in each hand from opposite sides of the mushroom. She ate some of the piece in her left hand, and waited to see what would happen.

A minute later her head was as high as the tallest tree in the wood, and she was looking at a sea of green leaves. Then a bird appeared and began to fly around her head, screaming, ‘Egg thief! Egg thief! Go away!’

‘I’m not an egg thief,’ said Alice.

‘Oh no?’ said the bird angrily. ‘But you eat eggs, don’t you?’

‘Well, yes, I do, but I don’t steal them,’ explained Alice quickly. ‘We have them for breakfast, you know.’

‘Then how do you get them, if you don’t steal them?’ screamed the bird.

This was a difficult question to answer, so Alice brought up her right hand through the leaves and ate a little from the other piece of mushroom. She began to get smaller at once and, very carefully, she ate first from one hand, then from the other, until she was about twenty- five centimetres high.

‘That’s better,’ she said to herself. ‘And now I must find that garden.’ She began to walk through the wood, and after a while she came to a little house.

There was a boy outside the door, with a large letter in his hand. (He was dressed like a boy, but his face was very like a fish, Alice thought.) The Fish-Boy knocked at the door, and a second later a large plate came flying out of an open window.

‘A letter for the Duchess,’ the Fish-Boy shouted. He pushed the letter under the door and went away.

Alice went up to the door and knocked, but there was a lot of noise inside and nobody answered. So she opened the door and walked in.

‘A letter for the Duchess,’ the Fish-Boy shouted

She found herself in a kitchen, which was full of smoke. There was a very angry cook by the fire, and in the middle of the room sat the Duchess, holding a screaming baby. Every few minutes a plate crashed to the floor. There was also a large cat, which was sitting on a chair and grinning from ear to ear.

‘Please,’ Alice said politely to the Duchess, ‘why does your cat grin like that?’

‘It’s a Cheshire Cat,’ said the Duchess. ‘That’s why.’

‘I didn’t know that cats could grin,’ said Alice.

‘Well, you don’t know much,’ said the Duchess. Another plate crashed to the floor and Alice jumped. ‘Here!’ the Duchess went on. ‘You can hold the baby for a bit, if you like. The Queen has invited me to play croquet, and I must go and get ready.’ She pushed the baby into Alice’s arms and hurried out of the room.

There was a large cat, which was grinning from ear to ear.

‘Oh, the poor little thing!’ said Alice, looking at the baby, which had a very strange face. She took it outside into the wood and walked around under the trees. Then the baby began to make strange noises, and Alice looked into its face again. Its eyes were really very small for a baby, and its nose now looked very like the nose of a pig.

‘Don’t make noises like that, my dear,’ said Alice. ‘It’s not polite. You’re beginning to sound like a pig.’

But a few minutes later, there was no mistake. It was a pig. Alice put it carefully on the ground, and it ran quietly away on its four legs into the wood.

‘I’m pleased about that,’ Alice said to herself. ‘It will be a good-looking pig, but it would be terrible to be a child with a face like that.’

She was thinking about pigs and children when she suddenly saw the Cheshire Cat in a tree. The Cat grinned at her, and she went nearer to it.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘can you tell me which way to go from here?’

‘But where do you want to get to?’ said the Cat.

‘It doesn’t really matter—’ began Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

‘But I would like to get somewhere,’ Alice explained.

‘If you just go on walking,’ said the Cat, ‘in the end you’ll arrive somewhere.’

That was true, thought Alice, but not very helpful, so she tried another question. ‘What kind of people live near here?’

‘To the left,’ the Cat said, ‘lives a Hatter. And to the right, lives a March Hare. You can visit either of them. They’re both mad.’

‘But I don’t want to visit mad people,’ said Alice.

‘We’re all mad here, you know,’ said the Cat. ‘I’m mad. You’re mad.’

‘How do you know that I’m mad?’ said Alice.

‘Of course you’re mad,’ said the Cat. ‘Only mad people come here.’

Alice was thinking about this, but the Cat went on, ‘Are you playing croquet with the Queen today?’

‘I would like to very much,’ said Alice, ‘but nobody has invited me yet.’

‘You’ll see me there,’ said the Cat, and vanished.

Alice was not really surprised at this, because so many strange things were happening today. She was still looking at the tree when, suddenly, the Cat appeared again.

‘I forgot to ask,’ said the Cat. ‘What happened to the baby?’

‘It turned into a pig,’ Alice said.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said the Cat, and vanished again.

Alice began to walk on, and decided to visit the March Hare. ‘It’s the month of May now,’ she said to herself, ‘so perhaps the Hare won’t be as mad as he was in March.’

Suddenly, there was the Cheshire Cat again, sitting in another tree. Alice jumped in surprise.

‘Do you think,’ she said politely, ‘that you could come and go more slowly?’

‘All right,’ said the Cat. And this time it vanished very slowly. First its tail went, then its body, then its head, and last, the grin.

‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice, ‘but never a grin without a cat!’

Soon she saw the house of the March Hare in front of her. It was a large house, so she ate a little piece of mushroom to get bigger, and walked on.

This time the Cat vanished very slowly.

There was a table under a tree outside the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea. A Dormouse was sitting between them, asleep. The three of them were all sitting together at one corner of the table, but the table was large and there were many other seats. Alice sat down in a big chair at one end.

‘Have some coffee,’ the March Hare said in a friendly voice.

Alice looked all round the table, but she could only see a teapot. ‘I don’t see any coffee,’ she said.

‘There isn’t any,’ said the March Hare.

‘Then why did you ask me to have some?’ said Alice crossly. ‘It wasn’t very polite of you.’

‘It wasn’t very polite of you to sit down. We haven’t invited you to tea,’ said the March Hare.

‘But there are lots of seats,’ said Alice.

‘Your hair’s too long,’ said the Hatter, looking at Alice with interest.

‘It’s not polite to say things like that,’ said Alice.

The Hatter looked surprised, but he said, ‘Why is a bird like a desk?’

Alice was pleased. She enjoyed playing wordgames, so she said, ‘That’s an easy question.’

‘Do you mean you know the answer?’ said the March Hare.

‘Yes,’ said Alice.

‘Then you must say what you mean,’ the March Hare said.

‘I do,’ Alice said quickly. ‘Well, I mean what I say. And that’s the same thing, you know.’

‘No, it isn’t!’ said the Hatter. ‘Listen to this. I see what I eat means one thing, but I eat what I see means something very different.’

Alice did not know what to say to this. So she took some tea and some bread-and-butter while she thought about it. The Dormouse woke up for a minute and then went to sleep again. After a while the Hatter took out his watch, shook it, then looked at it sadly.

‘Two days slow! I told you that butter wasn’t good for watches!’ he said angrily to the March Hare.

‘It was the best butter,’ said the March Hare sadly.

Alice was looking at the watch with interest. ‘It’s a strange watch,’ she said. ‘It shows the day of the week, but not the time.’

‘But we know the time,’ said the Hatter. ‘It’s always six o’clock here.’

Alice suddenly understood. ‘Is that why there are all these cups and plates?’ she said. ‘It’s always tea-time here, and you go on moving round the table. Is that right? But what happens when you come to the beginning again?’

‘Don’t ask questions,’ said the March Hare crossly. ‘You must tell us a story now.’

‘But I don’t know any stories,’ said Alice.

Then the March Hare and the Hatter turned to the Dormouse. ‘Wake up, Dormouse!’ they shouted loudly in its ears. ‘Tell us a story.’

‘Yes, please do,’ said Alice.

The Dormouse woke up and quickly began to tell a story, but a few minutes later it was asleep again. The March Hare poured a little hot tea on its nose, and the Hatter began to look for a clean plate. Alice decided to leave and walked away into the wood. She looked back once, and the March Hare and the Hatter were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.

The March Hare poured a little hot tea on the Dormouse’s nose.

‘Well, I won’t go there again,’ said Alice. ‘What a stupid tea-party it was!’ Just then she saw a door in one of the trees. ‘How curious!’ she thought. ‘But everything is strange today. I think I’ll go in.’

So she went in. And there she was, back in the long room with the little glass table. At once, she picked up the gold key from the table, unlocked the little door into the garden, and then began to eat a piece of mushroom. When she was down to about thirty centimetres high, she walked through the door, and then, at last, she was in the beautiful garden with its green trees and bright flowers.

Near the door there was a rose-tree and three gardeners, who were looking at the roses in a very worried way.

‘What’s the matter?’ Alice said to them.

‘You see, Miss,’ said the first gardener, ‘these roses are white, but the Queen only likes red roses, and she—’

‘The Queen!’ said the second gardener suddenly, and at once, the three gardeners lay down flat on their faces. Alice turned round and saw a great crowd of people.

It was a pack of cards, walking through the garden. There were clubs (they were soldiers), and diamonds, and ten little children (they were hearts). Next came some Kings and Queens. Then Alice saw the White Rabbit, and behind him, the Knave of Hearts. And last of all, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.

When the crowd came near to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, and the Queen said, ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Alice, Your Majesty,’ said Alice very politely. But she thought to herself, ‘They’re only a pack of cards. I don’t need to be afraid of them!’

‘And who are these? said the Queen, looking at the three gardeners. Then she saw the white roses, and her face turned red and angry. ‘Off with their heads!’ she shouted, and soldiers hurried up to take the gardeners away. The Queen turned to Alice. ‘Can you play croquet?’ she shouted.

‘Yes!’ shouted Alice.

‘Come on, then!’ shouted the Queen. The crowd began to move on, and Alice went with them.

‘It’s – it’s a very fine day,’ said a worried voice in her ear. Alice saw that the White Rabbit was by her side.

‘Very fine,’ said Alice. ‘Where’s the Duchess?’

‘Shhh!’ said the Rabbit in a hurried voice. ‘She’s in prison, waiting for execution.’

‘What for?’ said Alice.

But just then the Queen shouted, ‘Get to your places!’ and the game began.

It was the strangest game of croquet in Alice’s life! The balls were hedgehogs, and the mallets were flamingoes. And the hoops were made by soldiers, who turned over and stood on their hands and feet. Alice held her flamingo’s body under her arm, but the flamingo turned its long neck first this way and then that way. At last, Alice was ready to hit the ball with the flamingo’s head. But by then, the hedgehog was tired of waiting and was walking away across the croquet-ground. And when both the flamingo and the hedgehog were ready, there was no hoop! The soldiers too were always getting up and walking away. It really was a very difficult game, Alice thought.

The players all played at the same time, and they were always arguing and fighting for hedgehogs. Nobody could agree about anything. Very soon, the Queen was wildly angry, and went around shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once a minute.

Alice began to feel worried. ‘The Queen is sure to argue with me soon,’ she thought. ‘And what will happen to me then? They’re cutting people’s heads off all the time here. I’m surprised there is anyone left alive!’

Just then she saw something very strange. She watched carefully, and after a minute or two she saw that the thing was a grin. ‘It’s the Cheshire Cat,’ she said to herself. ‘Now I’ll have somebody to talk to.’

The balls were hedgehogs, and the mallets were flamingoes

‘How are you getting on?’ said the Cat, when its mouth appeared.

Alice waited. ‘I can’t talk to something without ears,’ she thought. Slowly the Cat’s eyes, then its ears, and then the rest of its head appeared. But it stopped at the neck, and its body did not appear.

Alice began to tell the Cat all about the game. ‘It’s very difficult to play,’ she said. ‘Everybody argues all the time, and the hoops and the hedgehogs walk away.’

‘How do you like the Queen?’ said the Cat quietly.

‘I don’t,’ said Alice. ‘She’s very—’ Just then she saw the Queen behind her, so she went on, ‘—clever. She’s the best player here.’

The Queen smiled and walked past.

‘Who are you talking to?’ said the King. He came up behind Alice and looked at the Cat’s head in surprise.

‘It’s a friend of mine – a Cheshire Cat,’ said Alice.

‘I’m not sure that I like it,’ said the King. ‘But it can touch my hand if it likes.’

‘I prefer not to,’ said the Cat.

‘Well!’ said the King angrily. He called out to the Queen, ‘My dear! There’s a cat here, and I don’t like it.’

The Queen did not look round. ‘Off with its head!’ she shouted. ‘Call for the executioner!’

Alice was a little worried for her friend, but when the executioner arrived, everybody began to argue.

‘I can’t cut off a head,’ said the executioner, ‘if there isn’t a body to cut it off from.’

‘You can cut the head off,’ said the King, ‘from anything that’s got a head.’

‘If somebody doesn’t do something quickly,’ said the Queen, ‘I’ll cut everybody’s head off.’

Nobody liked that plan very much, so they all turned to Alice. ‘And what do you say?’ they cried.

‘The Cat belongs to the Duchess,’ said Alice carefully. ‘Perhaps you could ask her about it.’

‘She’s in prison,’ the Queen said to the executioner. ‘Bring her here at once.’

But then the Cat’s head slowly began to vanish, and when the executioner came back with the Duchess, there was nothing there. The King ran wildly up and down, looking for the Cat, and the Duchess put her arm round Alice. ‘I’m so pleased to see you again, my dear!’ she said.

‘Let’s get on with the game,’ the Queen said angrily, and Alice followed her back to the croquet-ground.

The game went on, but all the time the Queen was arguing, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ Soon there were no hoops left, because the soldiers (who were the hoops) were too busy taking everybody to prison. And at the end there were only three players left – the King, the Queen, and Alice.

The Queen stopped shouting and said to Alice, ‘Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?’

‘No,’ said Alice. ‘I’m not sure what a Mock Turtle is.’

‘Then come with me,’ said the Queen.

They found the Mock Turtle down by the sea. Next to him was a Gryphon, asleep in the sun. Then the Queen hurried away, saying, ‘I have to get on with some executions.’

The Gryphon woke up, and said sleepily to Alice, ‘It’s just talk, you know. They never execute anybody.’

Alice was pleased to hear this. She felt a little afraid of the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, because they were so large. But they were very friendly, and sang songs and told her many stories about their lives. The Mock Turtle was in the middle of a very sad song when they all heard a shout a long way away: ‘It’s beginning!’ ‘Come on! We must hurry!’ cried the Gryphon. It took Alice by the hand and began to run.

The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon were very friendly.

The King and Queen of Hearts were sitting on their thrones when Alice and the Gryphon arrived. There was a great crowd of birds and animals, and all the pack of cards.

Soldiers stood all around the Knave of Hearts, and near the King was the White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one hand.

In the middle of the room there was a table, with a large plate of tarts on it. ‘They look good,’ thought Alice, who was feeling a little hungry.

Then the White Rabbit called out loudly, ‘Silence! The trial of the Knave of Hearts will now begin!’ He took out a long piece of paper, and read:

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,

All on a summer day.

The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,

And took them all away.

‘Very good,’ said the King. ‘Call the first witness.’

Alice looked at the jury, who were now writing everything down. It was a very strange jury. Some of the jurymen were animals, and the others were birds.

Then the White Rabbit blew his trumpet three times, and called out, ‘First witness!’

The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other hand. ‘I’m very sorry, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘I was in the middle of tea when the trial began.’

‘Take off your hat,’ the King said.

‘It isn’t mine,’ said the Hatter.

‘Stolen! Write that down,’ the King said to the jury.

‘I keep hats to sell,’ explained the Hatter. ‘I don’t have a hat myself. I’m a Hatter.’

‘Give your evidence,’ said the King, ‘or we’ll cut your head off.’

The Hatter’s face turned white. ‘I’m a poor man, Your Majesty,’ he began, in a shaking voice.

Just then Alice had a strange feeling. After a minute or two she understood what it was.

‘Don’t push like that,’ said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. ‘I’m nearly falling off my seat.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ Alice said politely. ‘I’m getting bigger and taller, you see.’

‘Well, you can’t do that here,’ said the Dormouse crossly, and he got up and moved to another seat.

The Hatter was still giving evidence, but nobody could understand a word of it. The King looked at the Queen, and the Queen looked at the executioner.

The unhappy Hatter saw this, and dropped his bread- and-butter. ‘I’m a poor man, Your Majesty,’ he said again.

‘You’re a very poor speaker,’ said the King. He turned to the White Rabbit. ‘Call the next witness,’ he said.

The next witness was the Duchess’s cook, who spoke very angrily and said that she would not give any evidence. The King looked worried and told the White Rabbit to call another witness. Alice watched while the White Rabbit looked at the names on his piece of paper. Then, to her great surprise, he called out loudly, ‘Alice!’ ‘Here!’ cried Alice, jumping to her feet.

‘Here!’ cried Alice, jumping to her feet.

‘What do you know about these tarts?’ said the King.

‘Nothing,’ said Alice.

The Queen was looking hard at Alice. Now she said,

‘All people a mile high must leave the room.’

‘I’m not a mile high,’ said Alice. ‘And I won’t leave the room. I want to hear the evidence.’

‘There is no more evidence,’ said the King very quickly, ‘and now the jury will—’

‘Your Majesty!’ said the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry. ‘We’ve just found this letter. There’s no name on it, but I think the Knave wrote it.’

‘No, I didn’t!’ said the Knave loudly.

‘Read it to us,’ said the King.

‘Where shall I begin, Your Majesty?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Begin at the beginning,’ said the King, ‘and go on until you get to the end, then stop.’

Everybody listened very carefully while the White Rabbit read these words.

They tell me you have been to her,

And talked of me to him.

She thought I was a gardener,

But said I could not swim.

He tells them that I have not gone,

(We know that this is true).

If she decide to hurry on,

What will they do to you?

I gave her one, they gave him two,

You gave us three or more.

They all returned from him to you,

But they were mine before.

‘That’s a very important piece of evidence,’ said the King. He looked very pleased. ‘Now the jury must—’

‘If anybody in the jury can explain that letter,’ said Alice (she was not afraid of anything now, because she was much bigger than everybody in the room), ‘I’ll give him sixpence. It’s all nonsense! It doesn’t mean anything.’

The jury busily wrote this down. ‘She thinks it’s all nonsense.’

‘All nonsense, eh?’ said the King. He read some of the words again. ‘But said I could not swim. You can’t swim, can you?’ he said to the Knave.

The Knave’s face was sad. ‘Do I look like a swimmer?’ he said. (And he didn’t – because he was made of paper.)

The King smiled. ‘I understand everything now,’ he said. ‘There are the tarts, and here is the Knave of Hearts. And now the jury must decide who the thief is.’

‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Off with his head! The jury can say what it thinks later.’

‘What nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The jury must decide first. You can’t—’

‘Be quiet!’ said the Queen, her face turning red.

‘I won’t!’ said Alice.

‘Off with her head!’ screamed the Queen. Nobody moved.

‘It doesn’t matter what you say,’ said Alice. ‘You’re only a pack of cards!’

Then the pack of cards flew up into the sky and began to fall on Alice’s face. She gave a little scream . . . and woke up. She was lying next to her sister under the trees, and some leaves were falling on her face.

‘Wake up, Alice dear,’ said her sister. ‘You’ve been asleep a long time.’

‘Oh, I’ve had a very curious dream!’ said Alice, and she told her sister all about the strange adventures in her wonderful dream.

10 entertaining homework ideas for online English Language Learners

1. Cafe hopper

2. TikTok star

3. Let’s go to the movies

4. Hello Mr. Teacher!

5. Interview a stranger

6. Shine like a Karaoke star

7. Expert on the loose

8. 24 hour English challenge

9. It’s a wrap!

10. Masterchef extraordinaire

Homework doesn’t have to be boring!

Recommended for you:

Homework for ESL Students – 10 Ideas for Teachers

Homework Ideas for ESL Students

1. Daily Journaling

2. Making Flashcards

3. Reading Comprehension Exercises

4. Podcasts and Songs

5. Video Diaries

6. Role-play in Real-world Scenarios

7. Grammar Worksheets

8. Online Games

9. Book Club

10. Pen Pal Program

Don’t miss out!

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EnglishForEveryone.org

Top 7 English Homework Tips for Teachers, Students and Parents

7 ways to create meaningful English homework. Tips for teachers, parents and students

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 1: Bin the Busy Work!

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 2: Make The Homework Fit for Purpose

YEAR LONG DIGITAL READING LOG / DIARY

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 3: Set Time Limits

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 4: Give Timely Feedback

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 5: Get Creative with the Tasks

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 6: Leverage Interest

ENGLISH HOMEWORK TIP 7: Give Homework At The Start of the Lesson

The Takeaways

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English Homework

Level: pre-intermediate

Level: intermediate

Vocabulary Homework

11 ESL Homework Ideas To Engage Your Learners & Simplify Lesson Planning

How To Make Homework Work For You &Your Students

1.Read A Short Story Or Short Book Chapter

2. Listen To A Short Podcast Episode

3. Presentation About A Passion

4. Write A Review

5. Get Creative

6. Share Amazing Anecdotes

7. Blogs And Blogging

8. Start A Podcast

9. Class WhatsApp Group

10. Write A Letter

11. The Student Becomes The Teacher

11 ESL Homework Ideas

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