Tag: teaching ideas

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II: Five Teaching Ideas

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I was saddened to have learnt about the passing of our great Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She was truly an inspiration and figure that all students that I had the pleasure to teach, knew a little about. In today’s post, I am sharing some videos, material, etc. that you could use in your lessons to raise student awareness about the Queen and the Royal Family.

1. A Look Back At The Queen’s Life: Video Quiz

When it comes to interactive videos which incorporate quizzes, I tend to get students to come up to computer and select or type the correct answer. The following video is a great introduction to the life of Queen Elizabeth II and after students have completed it, you could get students to try to recall as much information as possible. One possible grammar point on this lesson would naturally lead to the Past Simple.

How To Make Reading More Engaging

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In this quick post, I share five tips to make your reading more engaging and entertaining for your learners. I have also supplemented the post with a video for those that want to watch something for 5 minutes.

Should you enjoy the video, please leave a Like and Subscribe if you haven’t already.

Five Icebreakers in the EFL Classroom

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Those dreaded first lessons do not have to be stressful. Watch the video below for some ideas on five icebreakers in the EFL classroom.

What activities or techniques do you incorporate in your first lessons? Have you tried any ideas in the video?

Story Cubes: Ten Teaching Ideas

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A few months ago, I decided to invest in some Story Cubes and have been trying them out with some of my classes. If you are unfamiliar with Story Cubes, they are a collection of nine dice with images printed on each side of the dice. They are stored in a convenient box which is super portable, with them being small enough to just place in your pocket. Anyhow, when using the Story Cubes in class, the students responded positively and created some very engaging and funny stories. If you want to find out a bit more information about these Story Cubes, you can check Rory’s website.

In this article, we look at ten teaching ideas for using Story Cubes in the classroom.

Classroom Community Builders: Book Review

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Introduction

I was kindly asked a few weeks ago by Alphabet Publishing to review a recent publication, “[amazon_textlink asin=’B074FWN3M9′ text=’Classroom Community Builders: Activities for the First Day & Beyond’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’elt09-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’99e0913a-87de-11e7-87ea-5d5087f5bc56′]”, written by Walton Burns. After a few weeks of waiting, the book finally arrived along with a personalised letter from the publisher.

The publisher, Alphabet Publishing, is one of those small independent organisations which specialise with practical ideas for teaching and lesson ideas. The first book that I reviewed for them was “[amazon_textlink asin=’0997762810′ text=’50 Activities for the First Day of School’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’elt09-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’1a0b37f9-87e6-11e7-88fd-bfbe6f384fc9′]” as a video book review. You can watch the video below or find out a bit more from a previous blog post.

Why Should Teachers Blog?

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Last week, I was inducting some new teachers into our school: preparing them for their teaching career for the year ahead. We looked at various areas about teaching: classroom management, get to know you activities, games in the classroom, etc. The final area we looked at was about continuing professional development (CPD). We looked at formal and peer observations, attending workshops, contributing to workshops as well as blogging. All teachers with varying years of experience, including a teacher who had just completed her CELTA (or equivalent), had only come across the mainstream websites related to English language teaching (TEFL.com, Dave’s ESL Cafe or Teaching English) yet had not really considered blogging a tool for CPD.

Teaching Ideas for Word Stress

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“Pronunciation Practice Activities” by Martin Hewings

So the past few months, I have been focusing more and more on pronunciation for all levels of learners, no matter whether they are young learners or adult learners of English. Anyhow, I tried out a new lesson idea today which was partly inspired from the wonderful book, “Pronunciation Practice Activities“, written by Martin Hewings. I would recommend any teacher worth their salt to purchase this book, as it offers some great pronunciation lesson ideas which could be incorporated into class immediately.

Most teachers would identify word stress with the teaching of new vocabulary or as a technique to support pronunciation for problematic lexical items. This is all well and good but it reminds me of a teacher reacting to issues rather than proactively focusing on areas of language learning. Personally, if a teacher is able to develop a lesson based around pronunciation and developing learners’ awareness of pronunciation, so much the better. There is by no means anything wrong by reacting to pronunciation issues as they arise but I think it would be a nice change of focus when we remind learners that there are some basic principles that they can learn no matter how large or small the lexical item. Nevertheless, lets look at one lesson idea which is published in “Pronunciation Practice Activities“.

Improving Spelling with Elementary Learners

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Hello all. It is almost the Lunar New Year, so a huge congratulations to those readers from China and the Far East who will be commencing their celebrations soon. Today, we are looking at how to improve spelling with elementary or low-level learners, particularly if they are from an Arabic background.

It is notoriously difficult to improve or develop an Arabic learners. There are some important things you could consider incorporating in class such as unscrabbling letters to make the words, removing the vowels from words and students have to write them in words and, one of my favourite activities, using Scrabble tiles in class. Watch the video below to see how I use them in class by getting learners to review spelling and vocabulary.

1. A Look Back At The Queen’s Life: Video Quiz

Introduction

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