ESL Curriculum for Beginners - Level 1

Guidance/Overview
First of all, thank you for choosing Twinkl’s ESL Curriculum for Beginners as part of your ESL classes.
Our curriculum is a set of ready-made ESL lessons for you to use with your students. We hope you enjoy
teaching them and that your students have fun while learning the basics of the English language. This
document is designed to give an overview of our curriculum with what each lesson covers, how to use the
worksheets and even an interactive games platform.

Teaching Guidance
Our ESL Curriculum for Beginners is aimed at young learners and teenage students who have never studied
English before, the twelve lessons cover the following basic topics:

- Simple greetings, emotions and ‘how are you?’.

- Numbers and ‘how old are you?’.

- Some countries and ‘where are you from?’.

- Classroom objects and ‘what is it?’.

- Fruit and vegetables and ‘what are they?’ to introduce plural forms.

- Friends and family words, as well as ‘who is it?’ and ‘who are they?’.

- Colours and ‘what colour is it?’.

- Animals and ‘what’s your favourite animal?’.

- Body parts and ‘what is this?’.

- Shapes and ‘yes it is’, ‘no it isn’t’.

You will also find that lessons 6 and 12 of the curriculum

serve as review lessons: lesson 6 reviews the content
learnt in lessons 1 to 5, whereas lesson 12 recaps the
content covered in lessons 7 to 12. The structures
and vocabulary taught in each lesson also have
corresponding audio files that are embedded into
the presentations, with both male and female
voices with different British English accents.

An overview of the curriculum can

be found in the following table.

Page 1 of 4 visit twinkl.com

 ESL Curriculum for Beginners - Level 1 : Guidance/Overview
Level 1 Teaching Scheme
Lesson Key Sentences
Hello, What’s your name?
1 My name is …
How are you?
2 How old are you?
3 Where are you from?
4 What is it?
5 What are they?
6 Review Lesson (1-5)
7 Who is this?
8 What colour is it?
What’s your favourite
9 cat, dog, elephant. rabbit, dolphin, lion, horse, monkey, tiger,
animal?
What is this? What are
10
these?
11 Is it a…?
12 Review lesson (7-11)
Vocab
(I’m) happy, sad, angry, tired, hungry, sick, scared, worried
Hello/Hi
I’m xxx years old
Numbers 1- 20
I’m from…
Mexico, the UK, the USA, Spain, South Korea, Turkiye, China,
Morocco, Brazil, Japan.
It’s a…
pencil, chair, bag, notebook, pencil case, table, pen, computer,
teacher, screen, keyboard, mouse,
Apples, oranges, bananas, tomatoes, grapes, avocados,
potatoes, eggs, olives, cucumbers
A revision lesson of all the content covered in lessons 1 - 5.
This is my../They are..
family, Mum, Dad, parents, brother, sister, grandma, grandpa,
teacher, teachers, friend, friends.
It's…
red, blue, yellow, white, pink, green, purple, grey, brown,
orange, black
My favourite animal is…
shark
This is my/These are my…
Body, nose, mouth, head, stomach, eyes, arms, legs, feet,
hands, ears
Yes it is
No it isn’t
Triangle, square, circle, rectangle, oval, star, heart
A revision lesson of all the content covered in lessons 7 - 11.
Page 2 of 4 visit twinkl.com
 ESL Curriculum for Beginners - Level 1 : Guidance/Overview

Formats
The curriculum has been designed so that teachers all over the world can use it in their classes, whether they
teach online ESL classes or in an in-person classroom. It doesn’t matter if you use PowerPoint or Google
Slides, as our lessons are designed to work with both programmes, although some of the functionalities may
be different depending on which one you use.

Lesson Structure
Each lesson begins by presenting the key structures that are to be learnt, before some guided reinforcement
exercises such as gap fills, matching exercises and even error correction. There are also several opportunities
for students to get in some invaluable speaking practice with structured dialogues and randomiser activities,
which will give them the confidence to practise what they have learnt in class. In the review lessons, students
revise what they have learnt in each block of lessons by completing true or false activities, dialogue creations
and matching exercises, as well as vocabulary refresher activities.

Extra Activities
Each lesson in the curriculum also comes with an accompanying worksheet for students to practise the
vocabulary and structures learnt in each lesson. If you’re an online ESL teacher, there is an interactive PDF
version of the worksheet for students to download and fill in the answers either on a tablet or a computer. On
the other hand, if you teach in a traditional classroom setting, the worksheets are printable for students to
complete by hand.

And that’s not all - at the end of each lesson in the curriculum, there is a slide with several suggestions of
PowerPoints and activity sheets for you to complete with your students if you feel like they need more practice.
However, if you feel you’d like to look at more resources for that particular lesson, there are thousands of other
ESL resources available on our website!

Interactive Games Platform

And last but certainly not least, we have a brand-new interactive games platform that will be launched soon!
The vocabulary and structures in each lesson of our curriculum for beginners will be included in an interactive
games platform that your students can log into using personalised log-ins.

More Levels Coming Soon!

That’s not all - we’ve got five more levels of ready-made English lessons up our sleeves! Stay in the loop with
any future updates by following our social media channels and checking our weekly newsletters.

Page 3 of 4 visit twinkl.com

 ESL Curriculum for Beginners - Level 1 : Guidance/Overview

Get in Touch with Us

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our ESL Curriculum for Beginners,
you can use the following channels:

Email us at esl@twinkl.com

Reach out to the Twinkl Cares Team (you can use the help button on the website).

Drop us a message on social media; Instagram or Facebook.

We’re also looking for feedback from teachers who’ve used our lessons, so please
reach out to us if you have any thoughts to share with us! We’d love to hear from you.

Page 4 of 4 visit twinkl.com