About us
We are a group of English teachers who, like you, teach kids. We know teaching little ones up to teens is not an easy task, and just as difficult is getting good, quality materials to use in your lessons … and finding them quickly!
Our aim, therefore, is to provide great ESL materials, specially made for teaching English to kids, which are quick and easy to find and print.
What do we do?
We create resources and materials for kids English teachers
ESL KidStuff has a huge library of lesson plans, flashcards, worksheets, craft sheets, songs, and classroom readers. We will keep adding to this range as well as offering different materials.
We’d also like to help out in other areas, too – sharing teaching tips, hints and advice and making this site an essential place for you to visit time and time again. We have a lot of “teaching help” sections here at ESL KidStuff – games, holidays activities, teaching tips, etc., and we are working on adding more! Look through our “Resources” menu for more sections.
ESL KidStuff is part of Focal Point EdTech Lda. with its head office located in Portugal.
How old are we?
We are 22 years old!
ESL KidStuff 2002 – 2024
Our story
Once upon a time …
… there were 5 English teachers. They were all from different lands: one from the US, one from Canada, one from England, one from Australia and one from Japan. They were all living and teaching English in Japan.
Even though they were from different countries, they had a lot in common: they all taught English to kids and LOVED their students. But … they were also over-worked, over-stressed and had barely enough time to prepare their lessons. The life of a kids’ English teacher was not an easy one.
They all knew each other from teaching at schools and would often get together for a coffee, a meal or drinks where they could let off a bit of steam and talk to like-minded people.
The conversation invariably came around to teaching materials. They had all in the past taught at large language schools, which were equipped with libraries and cupboards full of resources, such as flashcards, worksheets, readers, crafts, textbooks, CDs, toys, games, puppets, paints and so on – great environment for teaching kids! However, they had all gone on to teach privately, at smaller schools, local community centers, English clubs, etc., … basically away from a good supply of resources and materials.
These teachers now became hunters and creators of resources. They scoured the toys and crafts sections in $1 stores, copied whatever they could get their hands on, spent endless hours searching the Internet and became craft-masters, making all sorts of wonderful things for their lessons (posters, flashcards, game pieces, boxes … you name it!). It was a continuous struggle. Buying new flashcards and workbooks was extremely expensive and just not an option.
The group of teachers realized that they could pool their resources and share. It was a great idea! They suddenly had a much larger range of materials … flashcards that they never had, worksheets and crafts which they could use in many different lessons, plastic fruit, song CDs, puppets, toys, games and more.
As a result, life started getting easier for the teachers and their students received richer lessons with more variety.
Many materials were shared by the teachers via email. If they had created some new worksheets or flashcards for their latest lessons, they would send them to their four colleagues.
One day, one of the teachers suddenly realized that it would be easier if there was a place online they could all use and share their materials. The idea of ESL KidStuff was born.
None of the teachers had ever created a website but they were keen. After working their way through various “Dummies” manuals and online tutorials they created a simple site with Microsoft Frontpage (now discontinued). They bought a domain, registered with a host server, uploaded their site and started adding materials.
At first they were pretty much the only ones who used (or even knew about) ESL KidStuff. But suddenly, their new site started getting hits and they began receiving emails from enthusiastic teachers. Things then grew fast.
They were featured in magazines and newspapers (such as the Washington Post), were awarded with the website of the month award by BBC Education and started getting linked to from other sites.
It was clear that there was a need for a site such as ESL KidStuff.
Three of the original teachers are still involved with ESL KidStuff and more have contributed. We are more determined than ever to take the site further and continue to provide quality materials for busy ESL kids teachers.
Who are our members?
Our teachers are from all over the world
Members of ESL KidStuff can access all our materials – lesson plans, flashcards, worksheets, craft sheets, songs (audio and video) and classroom readers (with videos) – for the low cost of US$34 per year (or even better, US$58 for 2 years). If you compare this to the cost of buying flashcards, worksheet books, song CDs and classroom readers in [hide_on_uk]stores[/hide_on_uk][hide_on_us]shops[/hide_on_us] or online, you’ll agree that it is an incredibly good deal.
We have over 42,000 members from all over the world. Our first member was teaching in Korea and our most recent member at this time of writing (26 March, 2024) is in Tbilisy, Georgia.
Most of our members are ESL teachers, many teaching abroad but quite a few teaching in their home countries. We also have members who are not ESL teachers – kindergarten and primary school teachers, doctors (who use our health flashcards to help little kids explain their illness), social workers, child psychologists, autism carers, parents (who teach English to their kids) and even a university professor (she loves using our Halloween flashcards and worksheets when teaching US culture).
Becoming a member is easy – just click on the “Join” link at the top of the page to join and see samples of our print materials.