Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise – George Gershwin Sometimes my mind doesn’t allow me to enjoy the moment. Last week a group of actors from a drama club visited our school and they performed with our students. They improvised in the school yard. They started with some warm ups…
1. STORIES Students listen to a piece of music. Preferably something in an other language or instrumental. While listening, they just write the words that go with the melody. After listening, ask what they have listed. A student writes all the words on the board. Then they write a paragraph with the words on the…
Sometimes you can set unusual tasks that challenge thinking. Set time limit and tell your students to describe Some ideas Create a 5th season and describe it. Create a country and describe it. Create a new era and describe it. Create an other planet where people can live. Imagine a day is 36 hours. Describe the…
This is an activity I did with one of my classes last week. Choose a soundtrack of a movie (preferably an instrumental piece) Tell them that piece of music is from a movie Ask the students to relax and listen to the music When the music is finished tell them they are going to…
With my intermediate and upper-intermediate students,we read readers in the classroom. They are abridged but with some activities, we try to analyze the texts as much as possible. This is how I assigned them after we read The Grapes of Wrath 1. Choose a character and write a description 2. Write a book review. 3. Write…
In pairs brainstorm ideas: 1. When is the retirement age? 2. What do people do when they are retired? You can talk about what people do in our country and other countries. 3. Why do you think some people want to go on working even after they get retired? 4. When do you want to…
Reading Tara Benwell’s blog post was so much fun that I immediately wanted to create my own list. See my kids grow up I want to see them grow up and find the right job and the person for them:-) Learn Italian I have always wanted to learn Italian but I can’t find the time,…
http://www.glogster.com/flash/flash_loader.swf?ver=1269615592 The listening was an interview with 2 people who who took part in an experiment for a television series. The experiment was about if people of the 21st century could live in Iron Age. I wanted them to learn something from this experiment because if they just listen, they do the task and…
Yesterday I explained how to reduce relative clauses into phrases to my 11 graders and they were all confused. Then I distributed the handouts I prepared for them to exercise and asked them to rewrite the sentences. While doing the exercises they were bored and they couldn’t get the idea. Today I played a game…
Types of Dictations for EFL Classrooms I started a ‘train the trainer’ course in January. At today’s session, we looked into some listening activities and dictation techniques. As a teacher, I have never liked doing dictation in my class. It’s something I neglected. The only one I use is the wall dictation AKA the running dictation…
The idea is an inspiration from a student of mine who added a comment on the class blog to the link I added there and Ken Wilson’s asking on twitter if there were any Elvis fans out there and then I thought ‘yay, I have great ideas for the first lesson of the new decade. We…
I’ve been teaching English for 20 years and today I had my first workshop. I wanted to prepare a session from which everybody would find something to use. I learned some of these activities from ELT conferences or colleagues who were willing to share or from books or websites. I’ll write some of these activities…
