Idioms: learning and education

With this ESL worksheet, students will learn 12 idioms they can use to talk about learning and education and will practise them with various speaking activities.

The first activity introduces 6 idioms (hit the books, pull an all-nighter, play truant, rack one’s brain, draw a blank, It’s all Greek to me). Students work out their meaning from 6 short dialogues and then match the idioms to their meanings. As a practice exercise, students use 6 questions, each containing an idiom, to start a conversation with a partner.

With the next activity, students learn 6 more idioms (daydream, know by heart, teacher’s pet, with flying colours, cover a lot of ground, a cheat sheet) by matching sentences with similar meanings. To practise, students are given 3 photos. They have to describe the photos using different idioms and then relate the photos to their personal experiences. the next activity tests students’ knowledge of the idioms from this lesson – they need to rewrite the sentences given. The last activity is a role-play speaking activity: students are given 3 situations and in pairs or small groups they are asked to create dialogues.

This worksheet will work great in combination with a lesson related to education, learning and school.