Giving Advice for Aches and Pains

Giving Advice for Aches and Pains. Teach Your ESL Students How to Give Health Advice in a Fun and Engaging Way. Free Printable PDF

Giving Advice for Aches and Pains

Giving Advice for Aches and Pains

As an ESL teacher, it’s essential to engage your students with interactive, real-world scenarios that help them practice practical language skills. One area where your students will benefit from such practice is giving advice for health problems. The “Advice for Aches and Pains” activity is an enjoyable and effective way for students to practice this important aspect of language use.

In this post, we’ll walk you through an ESL teaching activity that teaches your students how to give health advice using long-tail keywords and helpful structures. Whether you’re teaching young learners or adults, this activity can be adapted for various age groups and proficiency levels. Plus, it’s available as a free printable PDF!

Activity Overview:

This activity helps ESL students practice offering advice for common health problems through a fun card game. The game focuses on matching health-related pictures with appropriate advice while using key sentence structures. It’s an excellent way to integrate vocabulary, speaking, and listening skills in one activity.

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How to Play the Card Game:

Step 1: Prepare the Materials Before the class, print out a set of picture cards (depicting different health issues like a headache, cold, sore throat, etc.) and advice cards (with phrases like “You should take medicine” or “Maybe you should rest”). Cut out the cards as indicated in the printable PDF, and you’re ready to go!

Step 2: Explain the Game Rules Start by explaining to your students that they are going to play a card matching game where they match health-related pictures to the corresponding advice. Break the class into pairs, and give each pair one set of shuffled cards. Make sure that the picture cards and advice cards are kept separate.

Step 3: Play the Game Have the students lay out the two sets of cards face down on the table. On each turn, one student picks a picture card and an advice card. If the cards match, the student keeps both cards and has another turn. If the cards don’t match, the student flips them back over, and the next student takes their turn.

The game continues until all cards are matched. The student with the most pairs of cards at the end wins. This not only makes the lesson fun but also reinforces health vocabulary and common advice structures.

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Teaching Structures for Giving Health Advice

Once students are familiar with the card game, introduce some key structures for giving advice. Write the following examples on the board:

1. Why don’t you…?
2. If I were you, I’d…
3. You should / shouldn’t…
4. You could / should try… + -ing
5. Maybe / Perhaps you should…
6. It might be a good idea to…

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How to Incorporate These Structures:

Step 4: Practicing with Pairs Now that your students are familiar with the cards and sentence structures, tell them to put their picture cards into a pile. Each student takes turns picking a card, for example, “I’ve got a cold.” Their partner then offers advice using one of the sentence structures listed above. For example, “Why don’t you take some medicine and get some rest?”

Encourage students to use varied structures and offer different types of advice, creating a dynamic and engaging dialogue practice.

Step 5: Class Interaction Once all pairs have finished, ask some students to model their dialogues in front of the class. This will help them practice speaking and listening skills, while also building their confidence in using new vocabulary and structures.

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Benefits of This Activity for ESL Learners:

1. Engages Active Learning: This game encourages students to actively use English, making learning more enjoyable.
2. Reinforces Health Vocabulary: By focusing on health-related problems, students learn useful vocabulary and phrases that they can use in everyday situations.
3. Develops Practical Language Skills: Offering advice is a real-life skill, and this activity helps students practice it in an informal, comfortable setting.
4. Boosts Speaking and Listening Skills: The activity fosters conversation practice in pairs, helping students improve their fluency and comprehension in speaking and listening.

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Download Your Free Printable PDF
This activity can easily be adapted for various levels and group sizes, and you can download the free printable PDF of the cards directly from the link below. It’s designed to be used in classrooms or self-study, making it an excellent resource for language learners of all ages.

Whether you’re a teacher looking for a fun activity for your ESL classroom or a learner who wants to practice English at home, this “Advice for Aches and Pains” activity is a perfect way to improve your language skills while having fun!

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Final Thoughts: By using engaging and interactive games like this one, ESL students will not only practice giving advice but also learn how to communicate effectively about health issues. This activity will help them feel more confident when speaking in real-world situations, and it’s an enjoyable way to learn English.

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Feel free to explore more of our free ESL resources, and don’t forget to share this activity with other teachers and students who might find it helpful!

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📩 Want more free ESL grammar lesson? Share this post with other teachers and let us know how it worked in your classroom!

💬 What other grammar topics would you like? Drop your ideas in the comments!

More ESL Classroom Games & Activities

Looking for more fun grammar activities for your English class? Check out these ideas:
✅ ESL Speaking Games to improve fluency
✅ Grammar Board Games for practicing sentence structures
✅ Interactive Writing Activities for ESL learners