All in the Family: Who’s Who? — Family & Possessives

Build confidence with family vocabulary, possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns in this engaging Elementary (A1) ESL lesson for adults and teenagers. All in the Family: Who’s Who? combines practical grammar exercises with listening, reading, speaking and interactive games, helping learners describe family relationships and explain who things belong to.

Designed for ESL and EFL teachers, this family-themed lesson pack connects essential beginner English with familiar, meaningful situations. Students move from identifying people on a family tree to introducing their own family and friends, discussing modern households and asking and answering questions about ownership.

This multi-skill resource includes:

• Family Vocabulary: An illustrated family tree, matching activities and sentence-completion exercises introduce family members and relationships, including parents, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles and cousins. Students also explore vocabulary such as only child, twins, single parent and extended family, alongside irregular plurals including child/children, man/men and woman/women.

• Possessive Adjectives: Clear explanations and contextual examples cover my, your, his, her, its, our and their. Gap-fill exercises, word-order tasks and a choice activity help students select the correct form and use it before a noun.

• Possessive Pronouns: A separate grammar section develops the difference between her bag and hers, and between Jane’s and hers. Sentence-completion and transformation exercises practise mine, yours, his, hers, ours and theirs, followed by a pairwork guessing game.

• Listening: Six short dialogues ask students to identify family relationships, supported by photographs and clear questions. A spoken follow-up encourages learners to express the answers using his and her.

• Reading: An accessible text about modern families and households, adapted from the UK Office for National Statistics, includes comprehension questions, vocabulary matching and a discussion prompt.

• Speaking: Personalised activities invite students to introduce family members and friends, ask follow-up questions and describe people in photographs. Options to use imaginary people make participation flexible.

• Teaching Formats: British and American English versions of the main lesson, presentations with and without answers, and printable A4 student lesson packs support online and classroom teaching.

Additional interactive activities:

• “Whose Is It? Beat the Teacher!”: A presentation-based team game in which students correct the teacher’s deliberate mistakes. Learners produce both forms—“It’s her bag” and “It’s hers”—before applying the language to their own belongings and shared possessions.

• “Whose Things Are These?” A4 Card Game: Printable picture and word cards provide two ways to practise: memory pairs and a quick matching game. An additional pronoun card set lets teachers extend practice from his, her and their to his, hers and theirs.

• “Family Clue Bingo”: A printable family vocabulary game with a student bingo board and cut-out caller cards. Students listen to relationship clues, identify the family member and race to complete a row.

Bring family vocabulary and possessive grammar together with purposeful practice, personal conversation and games that give Elementary learners plenty of reasons to speak.