Recycle old ESL Elementary Textbooks

As a teacher, I have had so many teacher´s book, student´s book, workbook and from different grade, levels and so on. I saw how the children threw them away at the end of the school year. I used to give them away for paper recycling but those places are not around anymore. Old textbooks are not good for donations, since the Publishing Companies come out with different series every year.

I still have several from my teaching days and decided to invent something. This is how it went with my Early Childhood and Elementary Series Textbooks.

Sorting. For the family theme there lots of pictures of family members, I just cut them out .I made a word card for each family member and had the students sort out all the pictures.

The pocket chart is another way to sort out all the pictures.

I found this old pocket folder. I grabbed clear pocket sheets, one for each family member. Students glued the word and the corresponding pictures. I used butterfly clips and made a book. Students can write each word using whiteboard markers and then erase it.

Sorting spoons in nouns, verbs, adjectives. Another sorting activity involving cups and spoons. I wrote Verbs, Adjectives and Nouns on each cup. Give the students the plastic spoons and sharpie markers. Have them write a word from the text on each spoon and have the group partners place it where it belongs.

Make a book. Many textbooks come with short stories that are  read like once in the classroom. Have the students make an accordion book.

Play Spelling Bingo. Give each child the short reading recycled page. After reading the story  using your preferred technique. Have the students select 15 words from the reading and write them down. Make your own list and cut out each word, place them in a bag. Start calling the words and the students tick them if they have that word written on their paper. The first student to tick them all off calls out BINGO!

Sort Noun and Verbs. Give the reading recycled page to each student and have them sort the words in two columns, one for verbs and another for nouns.

Write sentences. After reading the recycled story, students can write sentences in a grammar structure that you want to practice.

Match paragraph. I cut the story in pictures and paragraphs and placed them in a Cd sleeve. Students had to match each paragraph with the corresponding picture.

Sentence Association. There was this review page. I cut the picture and sentence and make a sentence association game. I glued all the cutouts onto fun foam.

Egg carton Alphabet Sort. I placed a small craft stick behind each cutout. I also glued a fun foam letter to each egg hole. Students sort all the pictures by the beginning letter of each picture.

Make a crown for each letter. With so many pictures from the book. I made a crown for each letter. Students have to find pictures that begin with the letter in the crown given and glue them accordingly.  Have the students show their crown to the class and the words that they found.

Write vocabulary words. Have the students glue each picture and write as many vocabulary words they know. The winner is the student that writes more words.

Please follow me! leave comments and request!