Grocery Shopping: Group Activities for the ESL Classroom
Speaking Activities for ESL Students
Increase your students’ talking time in class through these new group activities for ESL learners focused on practical skills. To help your students increase their confidence to speak in English, start in the safety of the classroom. Build up their practical skills through materials that focus on real-world communication. The speaking activities can be used as the key component of a single lesson or topic, or as a smaller piece of a larger module.
Free ESL Speaking Materials
To assist teachers in creating more communicative lesson plans, FLOW Speak offers free ESL teaching materials focused on conversation skills and group activities. These ESL activities are ideal for adult and young adult English language learners. Based on daily life, these speaking activities will bring more practical conversations into their English learning journey.
Group Activity: Grocery Shopping in the Classroom
Turn your classroom into a grocery store to help your students practice daily activities in English. This collaborative activity transforms your classroom into a supermarket where students will take on the roles of customer and store clerk through an ESL role play activity.
Students will practice matching foods with their grocery store category (ex: milk; dairy). They will also practice asking for help and answering questions. Outcomes include greater knowledge of grocery store layouts, increased confidence in asking for help, and an understanding of some polite expressions to ask for help.
How to Implement ‘Grocery Shopping in the Classroom’
Students will practice grocery shopping by familiarizing themselves with grocery store organization and asking for help. Students will take turns being the store clerk and the customer, while the rest of the class supports by becoming the store itself. These students will hold labels for different sections (e.g., bakery, dairy, deli) and will pass these labels throughout the store to keep the layout continuously changing. It is an ideal activity for learners with a beginner level of English or A1-A2 according to the CEFR.
The teaching materials include a page of detailed instructions for teachers as well as the handouts to facilitate the activity. The ‘Teacher Instructions’ page includes information on delivery, necessary materials, enabling objectives, and suggested homework. The suggested homework shares related FLOW Speak lessons that can be assigned after the activity for individual speaking practice to reinforce what was learned in class. The related lessons in ‘Grocery Shopping in the Classroom’ include the ‘Grocery Shopping’ AI Talk, the ‘Out of Stock’ Expressions Lesson, and the ‘Ask for a Refund’ Bites Lesson. If you are interested in learning more about using FLOW Speak lessons in your classroom, contact achieve@flowspeak.io.
Download the materials
FLOW Speak Activity - Grocery Shopping.pdf
