The Chinese Zodiac
ESL Lesson PlansThe Chinese Zodiac

The Chinese Zodiac

This ESL lesson plan introduces students to the Chinese zodiac through engaging reading, vocabulary, writing, and listening activities. Students will watch a video about the Year of the Snake (2025), discuss zodiac beliefs, and complete a fill-in-the-blank reading exercise on the legendary zodiac race. They will also match words to definitions, test their comprehension with true/false questions, and finish the lesson with a creative writing task where they invent their own zodiac animal story. This lesson builds critical thinking, storytelling skills, and cultural awareness while improving reading and writing fluency.

Skills

  • Can produce straightforward connected texts on a range of familiar subjects within their field of interest, by linking a series of shorter discrete elements into a linear sequence
  • Can reasonably fluently sustain a straightforward description of one of a variety of subjects within their field of interest, presenting it as a linear sequence of points.
  • Can read straightforward factual texts on subjects related to their field of interest with a satisfactory level of comprehension.
Online Interactive
Based on CEFR
Fully Customizable
1

Watch the video about the Year of the Snake (2025) and answer the following questions.

1
Which of these is a characteristic of the Year of the Snake?
2
How many Zodiac signs are there in total?
3
Which zodiac sign comes before the Year of the Snake?
2

Discuss these questions in pairs.

3

Match these words to their definitions.

4

Read the text to discover the fascinating legend of how the Chinese Zodiac began. Fill in the gaps with the vocabulary words from task #3.

5

Mark the sentences about the text as True or False.

6

Now that you've learned about the Chinese zodiac legend, create your own zodiac animal story!

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