fun – A Journey in TEFL

November 25, 2016January 3, 2017 Eva Buyuksimkesyan challenge, class project, efl, ELL, elt, esl, fun, fun activities, lesson ideas, presentations, quotes, speaking

Speaking For An Audience

These new kids need more public speaking skills than us. They will work on projects in teams, they will present their projects and they will need to be more confident in front of an audience. Thus, as teachers we can encourage our students to speak in front of an audience by assigning weekly projects. Friday afternoons can be a great time for doing this as on the last day of the week they feel tired and demotivated. You can find a lovely box, or a jar and put the project ideas in and ask them to choose the one for the next week.

Here are some suggestions but we can add more,

Every week students choose a song which tell a story and prepare a 3-minute presentation about the song. They have to mention the band, singer, genre and the story of the song.
Students scan through the week’s newspapers, online news channels and prepare their 3-minute presentation on current affairs.
Students find out about the movies or the plays on and choose one that they’ve watched or want to watch and prepare a presentation.
Students choose a quote that they like. Tell the class who said that and why they have chosen it and what it means.
Students choose a colour and research how that colour effects people.
Students choose two places they want to compare. they can be two cities, two cafes, two bookshops, two clothes shops, etc and prepare a 3-minute talk.

September 11, 2016 Eva Buyuksimkesyan efl, ELL, elt, esl, literature, reading, reading club, Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl 100 Years Old

September 13th is the Roald Dahl day and this year it’s his 100th birthday. Regular readers know that I’m fond of Roald Dahl stories and I love using them in class. I just wanted to bring some links that you’d like to use with your classes.

Here the schools are not open yet but I’ll start the year with some Roald Dahl stories with my Grade 11 and 12 students. So here you can find some ideas and websites which will inspire you with your celebrations.

My number 1 is The Official Roald Dahl Website, full of ideas and inspirations. You can find writing tips, games, stories and teaching materials there.

On Teacher Vision, you can find loads of links with great ideas.

TES also has lesson plans and ideas.

British Council’s literature project BritLit has a great lesson on The Landlady with the full story.

Some older posts on my blog can be found here

Well, let the celebrations begin!

February 7, 2016 Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, fun, readers, reading, short stories

Fun with Readers

Last week, with a group of twelve-year olds we had great fun reading a short story. It was our first meeting so I started with a getting to know activity which came from freshly Leo Selivan’s latests blog post. Kids loved drawing stick figures and introducing themselves in third person.

Then we read the story and enjoyed ourselves a lot. On this blog post, I want to share some of the activities we did during the workshops.

1.I gave them word posters and asked them to work in groups. We checked the vocabulary together and then in groups they wrote a mini saga choosing 5 words from the word cloud.

2. We wrote a rap together about the characters and their meeting with the fantastic characters. Then we sang it all together.

3. When the characters met new fantasy characters, I put them in teams and asked them to write their songs together.

4. I also cut some of the illustrations from the book and gave each pair a different picture and asked them to write “a six word story” for each picture.

5. After reading the story, they created a fantasy character and the land of the character drawing the character and the land.

6. Finally, as they told me they loved the stick figure activity very much, I asked them to work in pairs and gave each pair a character. They wrote their memes on a padlet wall.

In the end for feedback I told the kids to write 3 things they loved, 2 things they learned and a feeling. I loved the feedbacks very much but one of them made my day.

October 17, 2015 Eva Buyuksimkesyan character analysis, creative tasks, follow up, fun, novels, reading, short stories, Twitter bios

Twitter Bios for Book Characters

I’d like to share a quick activity I’ve done with my students. After reading a short story or a novel in the class or if the students are assigned to read their own choices, you can use this activity.

Ask the students to write Twitter bios for each character, (or the ones they’ve chosen) in stead of writing character descriptions. You can start with your own example. Tell them to highlight the significant characteristic of that character, adding hashtags as well. You may want to create a template for the exercise, the Power Point will help or you can ask your students to create their own templates.

July 28, 2015 Eva Buyuksimkesyan creative tasks, creative writing, efl, esl, fillers, fun, fun activities, lesson ideas, using photos, writing

Stories, Stories, Stories

Using photos in EFL Classroom, part 3

We are all stories, right? We tell a new story, the same story, another story all the time and we do it in the class too.

Today I’m going to mention activities that can be used to create new stories for the theme “Using Photos in EFL Classes”.

You can either ask your students to bring some photos they have taken or you can choose the photos you’ve taken or as usual, go to #ELTpics and tell them to choose the pictures they want to think about and write their stories.

You can tell them to write