How to Teach Prepositions of Movement

to, toward, from, away from, into, out of, onto, off, up, down, around, through, under – it’s a lot to keep straight! That’s why we’ve just released six lessons covering prepositions of movement and direction to help you solidify these important concepts with your ESL students.

We’re happy to announce that our prepositions of movement lessons are released and ready for you to teach. You’ll find them under our Prepositions Category on our Teacher tab. If you don’t yet have an account set one up on Home page.
P3.1 – P3.2 – Of-Movement-To-Toward-From-AwayFrom-Into-OutOf-Onto-Off
We find teaching prepositions of movement and direction, a bit more challenging than prepositions of time and prepositions of place. For this reason we continue our style of using very basic graphical representations to introduce each new preposition in our series. We relate these graphics to basic sentences so that your students can discover the use of these prepositions of movement. Here are two examples, one graphic contrasts the difference between the prepositions to (used to show destination) and toward (used to show direction). The other example is used for the prepositions from and away from:

P3.3 – P3.4 – Of-Movement-Up-Over-Down-Along-By-Across-Past
In our next two prepositions of movement lessons we cover prepositions to describe basic movements that are often used to describe transport and travel. We decided to introduce many of these prepositions using a travel and transport theme because we’ve found these concepts are easiest for students to relate with. Here is an example using the prepositions up, over and down (so far the transport/travel approach has worked well with our students):

P3.5 – P3.6 – Of-Movement-Around-Through-Under-BackTo-BackFrom-With-For
In our final two lessons for prepositions of movement, we cover every (we hope!) major preposition your student will require to describe direction. Most of these prepositions are interrelated, so we’ve decided to introduce them in groups. For example, here are two examples of our introductory slides, the first one introduces the prepositions around / through / under and the second one introduces to / back to / back from: