Prepositions of Place for Multilingual Learners
Today we tackle prepositions of place—an essential aspect of language learning that paves the way for spatial understanding and effective communication. Let’s explore creative teaching strategies, engaging activities, and specially crafted resources designed to make learning prepositions of place fun for you and for your primary multilingual learners.
What are Prepositions of Place?
Prepositions of place are words that help us describe the location of objects or people in relation to other elements in a sentence. For our young English learners, mastering these prepositions lays the groundwork for expressing themselves spatially, understanding of sentence structure, and using expanded sentences. In addition to explicit teaching and modeling, practice is important. Here are 5 engaging ESL activities using prepositions of place.
Use Hands-on Materials
Provide tangible objects like toys, blocks, or classroom items to allow students to physically demonstrate prepositions. This hands-on approach solidifies their understanding and makes the learning process memorable. My students love using a stuffed animal to show their understanding. You can let students bring a small stuffed animal or toy (or provide them) to practice prepositions with and watch engagement soar.
Incorporate Visuals
Utilize visual aids in conjunction with hands-on materials to introduce prepositions like “in,” “on,” “under,” “above,” and “beside.” Once students are familiar with the terms, provide for speaking practice with a sentence frame. You can add writing practice with “write the room” activities where you put visuals around the room and have students match them to the pictures on their paper and write the corresponding preposition (see above).
Play games
Matching games, “Simon Says” using hands-on objects, and “Hide and Seek” can help make learning prepositions a fun and active learning experience.
If you decide to use stuffed animals, “Simon Says” commands can be used with those. “Simon Says put it under you chair. Simon says hold it above your head” are just two examples.
Students can also pair up and one student puts their animal in position with classroom objects. The partner has to tell where it is. For example: “The bunny is on the glue sticks.”
Use cut up sentences
Prepositions of place work well with unscramble sentences. You can write sentences on sentence strips that you cut up for students to put in order, or you can check out the resources above for other ideas. These unscramble sentences start with 3 parts: subject, verb, and prepositional phrase and expand to 5 parts. These interactive worksheets build understanding of sentence structure and support beginning writers.
Add Writing Practice
With multi-leveled groups you need options. Note: picture one has unscramble sentences with one preposition, picture two has multiple sentence writing opportunities, and picture three allows students to write a multiple sentences of their own ideas allowing students to grow and express their ideas more fully when they are ready for the challenge.
Resources for Teaching Prepositions
Looking for more Sentence Writing Ideas?
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Happy Teaching,
Beth
