At the beach
Lesson plan overview
This ESL worksheet explores essential vocabulary and speaking skills related to going to the beach, summer travel, and outdoor leisure. Ideal for pre-intermediate to intermediate learners, this resource includes practical vocabulary activities, real-life speaking prompts, and listening comprehension tasks to help students communicate confidently about beach activities, packing, preferences, and common problems. Topics covered include beach items, verb–noun collocations, making suggestions, giving opinions, and handling typical beach-related scenarios. Other lessons you might like are. “Are staycations the new vacations?“, “Summer cocktails“, “Staying healthy while traveling“, “Idioms: the summer” and “Phrasal verbs: travel“.
Speaking: The lesson starts with a few conversation questions.
Vocabulary: Learners begin by matching beach items (e.g., towel, float, sunscreen, flip-flops) to images, then learn useful expressions to talk about packing items (e.g., We should bring…, Don’t forget…!, I can’t go without …, For me, … is essential.). Students write their own sentences using the useful expressions and the items they learned in the previous activity. After that, they work in pairs or small groups and choose 8 essential items to bring to the beach from a list of 20.
Listening: Students watch a video titled “Beach Bag Packing Tips” and complete a guided transcript gap-fill activity.
Vocabulary: Students learn and practice key beach-related nouns and collocations (e.g., apply sunscreen, throw a Frisbee, build a sandcastle, get stung by jellyfish).
Speaking: Next, students discuss conversation questions that will prompt them to use the collocations learned in this lesson, answer “What would you do if …” questions about common beach problems, which is a great second conditional practice, and plan the perfect day at the beach.
For more speaking practice, you can use the conversation cards.
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Teacher’s lesson plan
Student’s worksheet
Student’s interactive PDF
Conversation cards PDF
Pre-class activities
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In-class activities
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Additional resources
Each video-based lesson plan includes links to additional resources (videos and articles), which are FREE can be found online (in the pre-class activities page. These links aim to extend the learning experience, enabling students to connect classroom knowledge with real-world applications.
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Teacher’s lesson plan
Student’s worksheet
Student’s interactive PDF
Conversation cards PDF
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