I use idioms as a warm up for my ESL students, as it is a great way for them to learn common phrases in the English language. This can also be used for lower grade levels and special education. I wrote low level paragraphs that use the idiom as well as lots of cognates, have the students guess the meaning, and then mark context clues in the text. Students are exposed to both text, sentence structure, the idiom, and context clues. Students then must use the idiom in a sentence on their own. Final