I’ve decided to prepare song lessons that I can use in class. I’m planning to share them regularly. If you love using songs in the class, please visit the blog for a new song lesson every week. I will also be very happy to hear your ideas.
A new song lesson
5 Minute English is a site designed to give the learners short and easy explanations and exercises.
The learners can have a quick look at grammar, reading, listening, vocabulary and idioms. They can also find answers to questions that can be confusing for other learners. This is under the Question and Answer section.
If a student spends 5 minutes a day here regularly during the summer, he will benefit a lot.
News in Levels is another great site that teachers can recommend their enthusiastic students to study English during the long summer holiday.
There are short news articles for different levels. The student can choose her level and read the news and listen to it. She then can try the other levels for the same article. The words in the original news have been changed and adapted to 3 levels. The vocabulary definitions are also given.
I just came across with ETTC a site where the students can try writing poems on their own. The site allows the users
You can recommend Twenty Great American Short Stories
They will find 20 short stories written by Kate Chopin, Edgar Allen Poe, O’Henry, Jack London and many more. They can read one or two story a week and keep a reader’s response journal.
If you have really enthusiastic kids, instead of reading only 20 American short stories, they can choose a wider selection from Classic Shorts . I’m sure you will also like this site.
Lyrics Training is another site they can visit daily. They can listen to the songs and try to fill in the gaps according to their level.
I’m not a fan of doing Valentine’s Day activities in the class but this year I’m planning to do a song lesson. Next week is the first week of the second term in Turkey so this may also be good to break the ice.
I’ve been playing with BiteSlide for some time. Here is what I’ve prepared for the class.
What I will do with the song is …
We will watch the slideshow I created on animoto. I also uploaded the movie on the BiteSlide. Then I’ll ask students to write their song using the words. Before listening to the song. I’m planning to ask them which song it is. They might not know it but I’m sure you can guess it.
hint: I’ll focus on prepositions
image from #eltpics via @mkofab
In December, I had the chance to listen to Steven Krashen at YTU ELT symposium. He talked about the importance of reading, how he became a good reader and what narrow reading is. You can read Marisa Constantinides’ fabulous post on Dr Krashen’s talk here.
That was the time I went back to the past and thought how I became a reader. I did the narrow reading. There was a time in my life, I read Enid Blyton novels, then came the French classics and the Russians, I fell in love with Sartre, Camus and their contemporaries, then came the Italian novelists and the South Americans and of course there was a time I only read British novelists. There was a time I read poetry only -Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, Zahrad.
I was lucky to have two primary school teachers who led me to the paths of reading so I want to follow their footsteps. I believe teachers can help students become good readers. That’s why I think about fun activities to go with reading lessons.
Here you will find some activities that I use with my classes.
1. Tic-tac-toe
Write questions from the story or novel on slips of papers or post-it-notes and number them from 1-9. (Prepare double or triple questions for each number as students may not answer the questions)
Put in an envelope or a box or stick the papers on a ‘tic-tac-toe’ grid.
Team your students as Xs and Os.
Draw a tic-tac-toe grid on the board and tell them to choose a number. Take the numbered post-it from your tic-tac-toe handout. If they answer the question correctly, cross the number with X or O.
Continue until the questions finish.
|
1
|
2 | 3 |
|
4
|
5 | 6 |
|
7
|
8 | 9 |
2. Who Wants to be a Billionaire?
Play the game with questions from the novel or the story you read in the class.
3. Who said that?
Choose quotes or sentences from the novel
Divide the class into two teams.
Ask students “Who said that?”
4. Snowball fights
Tell students to write questions or quotes from the novel or the story on a piece of paper.
Tell them to make a paper snowball and allow them to play snowball fights for a while.
Stop them
Tell them to take the closest snowball and answer the questions.
You can guide them to ask their questions according to Bloom’s Taxonomy using http://teachers.ash.org.au/researchskills/dalton.htm#top
Now I’d like you to invite my first ever blog challenge 🙂
Would you like to share some of your favorite reading activities on your blog?
If you don’t blog, I’d be very happy to host your post on this blog.
Schools started. I have new classes and I have classes that I know from last year. We started working hard. We, as the English Department of our school, prepared lessons to motivate our students.
With my year 12 students, who will graduate and take the university exam, we read ‘Go and Open the Door’, a poem written by Miroslav Holub. It is a great poem to talk about opportunities, chances, memories, etc and my students wrote their own poems. You can view their poems on their class blogs.
With my year 11 students, we talked about overcoming obstacles, being decisive, being ambitious, the place of disabled people in the society, paralympic games. I used Sean Banville’s lesson on Oscar Pistorius. I told my students to create posters and some suggested preparing glogs. You can view their glogs on our class blog as well.
If you can visit our class blogs and leave a comment for them, they may feel more motivated.
