Exploring Canada in Group Activities

Ilona Sandor, OCELT
March 29, 2026
7:00 – 8:00 pm EDT

How much do our students know about Canada’s geography? What (tourist) attractions do they choose to visit? Is Niagara Falls one of their top destinations? Canada includes many exciting places to explore other than Niagara Falls, the Rocky Mountains, and Banff National Park.

This presentation will introduce new ways of learning about Canada’s geography. Engaging students in group activities such as designing vacation packages with enticing posters or asking them to brainstorm on how to revive Canada’s smallest town can enhance their knowledge and make learning fun. Making Canada’s map with geographical places derived from Indigenous words is also an enjoyable task. Real samples of student work will be shared with the webinar participants.

Learning outcomes:

  • To maximize students’ collaboration by doing group work. Each participant is assigned a different task and then the group members share their ideas and findings to complete the task.
  • To extract pertinent information from texts and online sources by doing some research.
  • To boost the learners’ creativity and motivation in meaningful and enjoyable group activities

Webinar Type: Teaching Best Practices

Categories: Blended Teaching/Learning; Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion; Reading; Speaking; Vocabulary; Writing

Teaching Sectors: Adult ESL (credit), Continuing Education/Adult ESL (non-credit), LINC

Participant Level: All levels

About the Presenter

Ilona Sandor (she/her) is an experienced teacher, a LINC Instructor and PBLA Lead Teacher. She has been working at Polycultural Immigrant and Community Services in Toronto for 18 years. Her students have won prizes in previous ESL-week contests organized by TESL Ontario (in 2010 first runner-up in poster contest; in 2011 Grand Prize in essay contest). Ilona has mentored TESL students over the years. Besides teaching, her primary interests lie in second language acquisition, teaching methodology and curriculum design. She is the author of the Hungarian language book entitled Szépen magyarul (Beautifully in Hungarian).

 

* Members must be a member of the TESL Ontario group on Tutela.

Please note: TESL Canada and TESL Ontario are separate entities. Your TESL Canada membership does not include free access to TESL Ontario webinars. To learn more about TESL Ontario Standard Membership, please click HERE.