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…
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…
I am working with graded readers, short stories and novels with my classes. I was also preparing my talk for TESOL France and looking for some new ideas to share, I designed the following lesson inspired from Chaz Pugliese’s Gossip activity from the book Being Creative. The activity may not sound similar but while reading it, I…
Without literature, language classes will be boring. I like ways to bring the novels, short stories, poems into the classroom and make my students think about things happening in them. I believe we are pretty lucky because we have so many online resources and texts that we can recommend our students to read. To tell…
One of the stories I love revisiting is Eveline from Dubliners. This year with my year 12 students we read it again. I’d like to share the follow-up activities we did. I grouped the students and assigned them with one task. They chose one and created the followings. FOLLOW-UP 1. Adapt Eveline to 21st century…
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…
One of my favourite writers for the ‘Reading Class’ is Roald Dahl. I’ve been using his short stories for almost a decade and the students have always loved them. I just came across with this pdf http://www.msad54.org/district/literacyspecialist/pdf/blooms.pdf But you can also get more ideas for using Bloom’s taxonomy in reading classes which I find…
Reading is a must for me. I feel guilty when I can’t find time to read. I feel stressed if I can’t finish a book I have started reading. I know we grew in a world where we had be told that the books a the best friends and things are not the same…
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…
