International Women’s Day – Materials for ESL lessons
Check out these ESL exercises made for the International Women’s Day. Practise English and talk about women’s possibilities and capacities.
Check out these ESL exercises made for the International Women’s Day. Practise English and talk about women’s possibilities and capacities.
Browse through some useful materials for Halloween for YL and teen ESL students.
ESL materials for Easter: quizzes, songs and worksheets LOOKING FOR COOL WORKSHEETS FOR YOUR ESL LESSON? 7 worksheets for kids and pre-teens: I spy, guided colouring, picture riddles with Easter characters, writing worksheets, secret messages for Easter, etc. READ MORE 10 worksheets for cool kids about Easter: Easter Egg Hunt printable cards, worksheets with colourful pictures to teach vocabulary & grammar and improve speaking etc. READ MORE 3 worksheets for teen ESL students: picture-based writing, writing with egg idioms and an interactive online worksheet for speaking & writing. READ MORE EASTER – 17th April 2022 VIDEO QUIZ (B1): Practise strong
SALES! Picture riddle worksheets to add colours to your lessons.
FREE SAMPLE available.
Cambridge YLE preparation books scaffold vocabulary in an excellent way: they don’t only teach the words/expression, but guarantee that these lexical items are revised several times over the year. Before a progress test or before the final exam, you might find some revision lessons useful and – above all – fun. One engaging way to revise vocabulary is to play TABOO.
If you prepare kids for YL exams (Cambridge STARTERS, MOVERS, FLYERS), then you are well familiar with the official wordlist. However, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the taught lexical items. With some textbooks, you don’t have to worry about anything: they teach and revise the requested vocabulary. On the other hand, if you teach classes without a textbook and/or with your own materials, you might find these Cambridge wordlists (Progress Checkers) useful.
This is the final week of ELT-Tutor’s Appy Advent Scratch Challenge (See the Advent Calendar here). For another 7+2 days, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so instead of memorizing code strings, kids
Welcome to the third week of ELT-Tutor’s Appy Advent Scratch challenge (download the Appy Advent Calendar here). Just like in the first two weeks, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game every day, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so
Welcome to the second week of this year’s Advent challenge with Scratch (Here’s the Advent calendar with the entire program). As you know, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game every day, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so instead
Looking for an alternative Advent Calendar? This year, I’d like to invite young and old explorers, creators, discoverers to spend the coming 4 weeks with a daily coding challenge. Every day, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc.
Teachers often face the hard reality that their students cannot purchase text books or their schools require self-made materials. Many of us continue teaching online and need some visuals they can screen-share and which then engage their sitting students. Most of the times we prepare for YL exams, but lack enough materials and books with only sample tests are really monotonous to teach. All this can be solved with these booklets covering relevant topics, with a great amount of visuals, engaging and fun activities and integrated exam tasks (Cambridge Starters, Movers and Flyers). Take a look!
Exit tickets? What are they? When to use them? And how? Let’s see. There are two delicate parts in every lesson: the lead-in and the wind-down. Of course, the main part is about the target language, but its success depends on how you introduce the topic. The same importance needs to be given also to the last five minutes of a lesson: if a student leaves your classroom excited, satisfied, their brain will connect the new grammar or vocabulary to previous knowledge – what’s more faster and with a great number of new connections. Whereas, annoyed and confused students block
A first lesson after a long summer break should be about discussing what you and your students have done since last time you met. It’s a great opportunity to exchange experiences, create a great group dynamic and revise simple past forms in positive, negative and interrogative sentences. So, here’s a quick idea for a welcome-back lesson:
Talking about clothes is always a great opportunity to revise not only vocabulary linked to fashion, colours and shades, but also to recap the word order ‘adjective + noun’. Last but not least, it is also a great opportunity to play. In this post, I’d like to show you one Scratch animation and one follow-up activity for both, online and classroom lessons. The animation (Scratch challenge): Instruction: Click onto the green flag and after a while stop the animation with the red button (or the space key). Describe what Daisy is wearing. For Teachers: You can play this game with
January 2021 – This is the last part of a three-post serie, giving suggestions on how to use Scratch codes in teaching English (and coding) to Young Learners (above all in online YL lessons). In the first part, I describe simple animations to revise numbers and prepositions of place, while in the second post, mazes were proposed to practice giving directions and question-answer animations. This time, I invite you to adventure into the Scratch world of quizzes and stories.
January 2021 – In my previous post, I suggested that teachers giving online lessons to YL try out some alternative tasks using the programming language Scratch. This coding program was customized for elementary school students to introduce them to the universe of algorithms, sequencing, variables and others. So the main aim of the Scratch project is to teach coding to pupils. However, Scratch could come in really handy when giving online English lessons to Young Learners. In Part One, you can read about how to practise numbers and prepositions of places with Scratch animations. In this post, I’d like to
January 2021 – As many of my colleagues, I ended up teaching completely online nearly a year ago. With teen and adult classes, the switch to video-call lessons was surprisingly smooth. However, things were not as easy with online English lessons with YL (Young Learners). Mainly, because parents – among them myself – were worried about how much time their children spent in front of different screens and secondly, because my students were used to lessons full of movement and games. We desperately needed inspiration. It came from one of the many Future Learn courses.
December 2020 – This is a simple group writing task I learnt from New Headway Pre-Intermediate some years ago. I find the exercise excellent to improvise a quick group-writing session about any topic even with lower level classes/students.
December 2020 – When I started teaching online, I first stuck to the course books I had been using for years. I had been familiar with the online extensions, I had already worked on the Cambridge LMS and used all multimedia materials available to my favourite course books. I had even had experience with e-books. However, very soon I realized that online teaching offers way more possibilities than only a digital copy of a face-to-face lesson.
December 2020 – THIS IS a WUP/Lead-in exercise you can print and use in your next grammar/conversation lesson. The task is to complete the questionnaire (by giving two answers to different questions) and then mingling around in the classroom to find someone who has these two things in common (which is not as easy as it seems).
November 2020 – Songs in ESL lessons are an evergreen possibility to lead into a new topic or introduce a new grammatical structure, they can be an excellent exercise to wind down a lesson and even in between two exercises (filler), they are good for making students relax, teach grammar and/or vocabulary through listening or just prepare for the next task. In this post, I would like to show you some interactive worksheets to do while listening to some great classics and also some newer hits – with embedded YouTube videos.
November 2020 – Charades is the name of the box-version of Pictionary games. If you don’t have it at hand, you can easily make one with a Quizlet set and use it as a WUP exercise in your next ESL lesson.
It’s essential with younger students to know what to do if things get boring or the class is getting too excited or to wind down your lesson with music in a classy way. Here’s a quick tip:
Students often need to express their opinion in 1-2 minutes, by responding to some questions, analyzing problems and/or proposing their own ideas. They don’t only need to do this, but should do it with adequate fluency and accuracy. Still, they waste time by looking for a word or try to put together a complex grammatical form. More than ever before an exam they need to understand what it means that they need to analyze and comment about a topic while the clock is clicking. Read this article describing a lesson tip about fluency training.
Nobody likes long word lists to memorize, it is monotonous and demotivating. Nobody has time to set up word cards, nowadays. However, it is essential to improve vocabulary in some way on a daily basis. Reading anything is an excellent way to widen one’s vocabulary, but not everybody likes reading. Listening to songs might work, but they require background knowledge of the songwriter’s intention and might become tricky.So here is a quick tip to introduce a new lexical item every day to your students with explanation and comprehension check:
Students often struggle with listening because of their pronunciation. Since they mispronounce words, they expect a different pronunciation and cannot recognize words because they are pronounced differently. It is not unusual that they don’t recognize words because the speaker’s pronunciation is different from the one they are used to (usually the teacher’s pronunciation). Students very often prefer one variety of the English language, e.g. British, only because they have had British teachers in English. However, English has many varieties.So, it’s essential that you approach pronunciation and varieties from the first lesson at A1 level.
ESL teachers are always supposed to write a lesson plan, to know what they are going to do in their lesson. However, the biggest part of the job is ‘on the stage’. Your authentic interest in your students, your skill to improvise, your sense of humor, your problem-solving skills will weigh more in your evaluation than the perfection of your lesson plan. However, to be good at problem-solving and improvisation, you need to prepare mentally (anticipating problems). Here are some ‘What to do…’ questions for you:
If you have back-to-back lessons or are sent to cover a sick colleague last minute, you might find yourself in the situation that you have your class in front of you, but you still haven’t cleaned up your materials from the previous lesson or don’t really know what to do in this class. Time to get 5 minutes to think.
About a year ago, I started to use QUIZLET to keep track of all vocabulary items we discussed in our lessons and it turned out to be really useful for both, online or face-to-face lessons. Quizlet is a platform where you can create flashcards to help your students memorize lexical items. The site does not send you any marketing mails or newsletters, but the free version has some banners (for all ages) on its pages. So, I set up a simple Teacher account and started to create my sets, one for every course.
BULLETPOINTS: Level: any; Age: 7+; Group size: any; Aim: to write a story together and to learn how to use paragraphs; Skill: writing; Grammar: -; Vocabulary: -; Length: 60+ min; Preparation time: none; Material: 5-10 sheets with a story starter (see below), pens, scissors, paperclips.
BULLETPOINTS: Conversation Lesson Plan with Aunty Emma Topic: Aunty Emma; Level: pre-intermediate to advanced; Time: 30-60 min; Material: whiteboard and marker; Preparation time: none; Skill: speaking; Function: (dis)agreement, negotiating; Group size: min 2 students.