Lemon Tree: Activities for Prepositions, Present Continuous, and Adjectives Lemon Tree truly is one of those songs that keeps giving, no matter which structure you want to focus on. I was reading Vicky Saumell’s Eltchat summary on Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 3 of 4): Specific songs and their uses, I…
Find a song in another language which has an English version. Here is an idea for ‘Il faut savoir’ by Charles Aznavour. The song may be more suitable for adults but the activity can be applied to other songs as well.Play the song Ask students to try to guess what the song can be about…
Improvisations part 2 Sometimes I adapt activities from TV shows, games, etc. The following activity is from a drama group called ‘Mahser-i Cumbus’. While watching their performance, I usually find great ideas for my classes. It sounds a bit confusing but it really is fun. Student A stands up and mimes. While miming she makes…
Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. – Henry Ford In some parts of the world the classes have just begun and here we still have time to prepare ourselves for the coming year. We all have some tricks to begin the new term, some fun ideas to make…
Well, I told you about the wonderful experience we had with Berni and told that the whole thing was part of a professional development course. We started with advanced grammar and continued with getting students to write, use technology tools (blogs, wikis etc developing ideas), or the traditional way. The following day was about improving…
image created via Add Letters Reading is one of the activities I love doing. However, students don’t usually like it as they haven’t built a habit for reading or they think they don’t read in their daily lives. When I ask about their preferences, they mostly say they don’t read anything. Of course, they do read. We know…
I believe from the moment we enter the classroom, our aim should be to help our students see where their learning journey is taking them to so the first day activities are important to give them some clues too. You can adapt the activities below according to your classes. If they are new comers this…
image from here I’m thinking about a new challenge. This year thanks to twitter and my PLN, I and my students experienced wonderful things. We had global projects and skype chats now I’m thinking to move it one step further. Sometimes we organise debates in the class. I thought maybe we…
Can you finish the following sentences so that they will be true for you? Without my PLN,… Twitter enables me … Social media is … If I weren’t blogging, … I love using sentence starters as a warmer, filler or a grammar/vocabulary activity. Whenever you feel you’re stuck in the lesson, dictate some sentence…
Beauty is a fat black woman walking the fields pressing a breezed hibiscus to her cheek while the sun lights up her feet Beauty is a fat black woman riding the waves drifting in happy oblivion while the sea turns back to hug her shape Grace Nicholls Since Jeremy Harmer read this…
I realised I mostly wrote about quick games, fillers or warmers that may help the teachers to motivate the students or change the phase or the pace of a lesson. I believe these activities are great to present and practice a new language. During the activities, students will be more involved, enthused and eager to do…
Joyce is one of the most difficult authors. It is not easy to understand him so he is not usually in high school teachers’ lists. However, if you have a class who loves reading short stories, you can give it a try to Dubliners. I’m not saying that we can read all the stories but…
