Free ESL Speaking Activity Grade 5

Grade 5 Free Time and Hobbies Speaking Activity: Free-Time Interview

About This Resource

A pair-work speaking activity where students interview each other about their real hobbies, then report back to the class using the topic's target sentence patterns.

Overview

Unlike a scripted drill, this activity has students find out genuinely new information about their partner, which tends to produce more natural, motivated speaking than a purely mechanical exercise. Using the twelve hobby picture cards as prompts, students choose five hobbies to ask their partner about, using both the preference question ("What do you like doing in your free time?") and the frequency question ("How often do you ___?"). They record their partner's real answers in a table, then choose one to report back to the class using a sentence frame. An Extra Challenge section pushes stronger students toward follow-up questions and comparisons.

Resource Details

Subject: ESL
Topic: Free Time and Hobbies
Category: Speaking
File Type: PDF
File Size: 168.3 KB
Published: 05 Sep 2026
Downloads: 0

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Grade 5 45-50 Minutes Speaking

Learning Objectives

Students will be able to ask "What do you like doing in your free time?" and "How often do you ___?" in natural conversation.
Students will be able to record a partner's spoken answers accurately in written form.
Students will be able to report information about another person using third-person sentence frames.

How to Use This Resource

Pair students up and give each pair one handout, or one copy per student if you want individual written records. Model the interview process yourself with one confident student before releasing pairs to work independently — ask a hobby question, get a genuine answer, and think aloud about how you'd record it in the table. Circulate while pairs interview each other, then bring the class back together for a few students to report back on what they learned about their partner.

Classroom Activity Ideas

Turn the Report Back stage into a short "Guess Who" game: one student describes their partner's hobbies without naming them, and the rest of the class tries to guess which classmate is being described. It adds a light competitive element to what would otherwise be a fairly quiet reporting stage.

Differentiation

SUPPORT: Reduce the number of hobbies each pair interviews about from five to three, and allow students to write single-word answers in the table before attempting full sentences in the Report Back stage.
ON-LEVEL: Students complete all five interview rows and report back using the full sentence frame.
CHALLENGE: Complete the Extra Challenge section — asking a follow-up question or making a comparison between two hobbies — with every hobby in the table, not just one.

Assessment

Use the Free Time and Hobbies Grading Rubric to score this activity, focusing especially on the Communication & Participation and Talking About Preferences and Frequency criteria, which this activity targets most directly.

Teacher Tips

Encourage students to ask a genuine follow-up question if their partner's first answer is very short ("I like reading" with nothing more) — a simple "Why?" or "How often?" often gets a fuller, more interesting answer and models the kind of real conversation this activity is meant to build toward.