Über Body Parts: From Beginner Flash Cards to Conversational Idioms

The Body Parts lesson is the mainstay of the ESL classroom, but finding a good & complete set of flashcards online can be tricky, and finding the worksheets that go along with them trickier still.  However, there are many good lesson plans for teaching body parts available online, and I will not bore you with mine.  Instead, let’s get right to the materials…

Body Parts Flash Cards

Download Body Parts Flash Cards

I put together these Flash Cards using images found online, editing many of them somewhat to add pointers to the specific body part. I tried to choose images which were explicitly public domain. However, please use these only personally, for educational purposes, which is how they are provided. If you know of an image which does not belong in this set, please don’t hesitate to contact me so I can remove it immediately.

Body Parts Bingo

Download Body Parts Bingo 4 x 4

Download Body Parts Bingo 5 x 5

BINGO has a bad rap among some ESL teachers become it is seen as a cop-out for real teaching.  However, after drilling the students on the body part flash cards, I like to have them write the body part names out in English at random in the BINGO squares, and then choose different students to speak out body parts I indicate on myself or other students.  For example, the teacher points to a student’s arm, and asks another student to yell out the word.  “Arm!”, yells the student, and all the other students practise listening by crossing out the word on their BINGO sheet.  Obviously, this is for low-level language learners, and is a more of an ice-breaker than a serious language acquisition activity.

Body Parts Scramble

Download Body Parts Scramble

Like BINGO, the Body Parts Scramble is meant to be given as a fun ice-breaker or easy homework activity.  Although this is not a good way to spend class time, it can be nice used as a puzzle for students to take away in order to practise the content of the flash cards covered in class.

Body Parts Idioms Dialog

Download Body Idioms Dialog Script

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This CGI dialog was originally created using xtranormal.com.  I used iMovie to dub in the voices and add the titles, music, and pop-up captions.  It makes for a great listening exercise before the following presentation.

Body Parts Idioms Presentation

Download Body Parts Idioms Presentation

The zip file contains JPGs, ordered by number.  The first and last slides are missing, since they normally contain the intro and walk-out slides that you must customize for your own audience.

This presentation covers Body Parts idioms, such as “he has a head for languages”, “you’re trying to pull the wool over my eyes”, “he’s my right-hand man”, etc.  It’s meant to be presented to more advanced conversational classes.

The images used in these slides were gathered from all over the web, and should be used only for educational purposes as examples of the action or phrase indicated in the slide.

Body Parts Idioms Evaluation

Download Body Parts Idioms Evaluation

This evaluation goes with the previous idioms presentation and video dialog.