Activities on the topic “Days of the week”

Days of the week are usually taught very early in almost every ESL courses. If you have already tried different songs, matching and fill-the-gap activities and your students still can’t remember the words, I am happy to share the activities which worked well with my students.

Here are some handy tasks to practice the vocabulary on this topic.

Activity 1 — Weekly Planner

Prepare a weekly planner, ask your students to complete the days of the weeks and then fill planner with activities they usually do (school, English lessons, going to the swimming pool, etc.). With younger learners add some funny stuckers, with teenagers — motivating phrases.

Activity 2 — Hashtags for the days of the week

What can be more trendy than using hashtags? Have you ever heard of #ThrowbackThursday (or #TBT)? It’s a popular internet trend used among social media platforms. Users will often post nostalgic pictures of their past accompanied by the hashtag #TBT or ThrowbackThursday.

Ask your students to think of hashtags for every day of the week. Then your students can google if their hashtags really exist.

You can find more information about daily hashtags here and here.

Activity 3 — Warm-up

What is the first thing your students see when they enter the classroom? Once I saw this idea on Instagram* and loved it! And my students loved it ?

You need to think of a word starting with the same letter as the day of the week, draw a funny picture and make up a question. Start your lesson with this question as a warm-up. Obviously, change the phrase and the question the next day. Next week ask your students to make up a funny phrase with the day of the week and a question to discuss.

Activity 4 — Lego

If you work with children, try building the words using Lego. Write the days of the weeks (or letters) on the bricks.

Activity 5 — Read a book

My young learners love shared reading. I often use books to present, practice or revise some vocabulary and grammar structures. While reading a book elicit the days of the week from your students, regularly revise the day before the action in the book takes place, ask to name the following day and so on.

Perfect books for this topic are:

The very hungry caterpillar — a book about a caterpillar, who loves eating and has been eating for the whole week. The book has simple text with educational themes – counting, the days of the week, foods, and a butterfly’s life stages. Here is an activity you can use while reading a book.

Jasper’s Beanstalk — Jasper the Cat plants a bean. He waits for it to grow into a beanstalk all week. Find out with children how long will he have to wait before he can start looking for giants.

For naughty children opt for “Cookie’s week”, a book about a clumsy, mess-making cat, Cookie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwbuz7Ya0K8

What activities do you use to practie the days of the week?