TABOO Cards: Cambridge YL Starters, Movers, Flyers

/ A1, A2, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Vocabulary training, Young Learners

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.

Cambridge Starter, Movers, Flyers Wordlists

/ A1, A2, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Vocabulary training, Young Learners

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.

SCRATCH challenge: What’s the difference?

/ A1, A2, Pre-A1, Speaking and Conversation, Teachers, Young Learners

Another Scratch app this time to use and remake. It helps your students practise to find and describe differences in pictures and for Scratchers it’s a nice way to practise costume-change and sprite editing. Find the differences Instructions: Click onto the green flag and then memorize the picture for 30 seconds.Then click the A key on your keyboard and note 5 differences.Finally, click onto SPACE and not 6 differences.Do you have a good memory? For Scrachers, SEE INSIDE, it’s a simple costume-change code, however, in some cases, you need to move the sprite away from its centre point. You might

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SCRATCH-Time: What’s the date?

/ A1, A2, Pre-A1, Teachers, Vocabulary training, Young Learners

For today, another Scratch animation to help your ESL students practise how to say dates in English. Telling the date & coding – two functions in one task: What’s today’s date? Instructions: Click onto the Green Flag, then onto SPACE. After some seconds, you will see a date.First question: Is it a real date? (30 February 2000 is NOT)Second question: How do you pronounce it? (e.g. the first of February nineteen – eighty four)Third question: Was it in the past or will it be in the future or maybe this is today’s date?Then press SPACE again… and again… For Scrachers,

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How To Prepare For Cambridge Movers/Flyers Exams Online – in a FUN Way?

/ A1, A2, Exam training, Pre-A1, Teachers, Young Learners

February 2021 – Teaching English to CHILDREN is fun. Teaching English to children ONLINE is a challenge. The task to prepare children for English exams online is an adventure… if you do it in a fun way. Today, I’d like to give you some quick tips how to do a great lesson with elementary school kids online using comics and preparing for Cambridge A1 Movers or A2 Flyers exams.

Online English lessons and coding with YL (Part Three)

/ A1, A2, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Young Learners

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.

Online English lessons and coding with YL (Part Two)

/ A1, A2, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Young Learners

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

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Online English lessons and coding with YL (Part One)

/ A1, A2, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Young Learners

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.

LESSON PLAN – Regular verbs in simple past

/ A1, A2, Grammar training, Teachers

December 2020 – This lesson plan introduces or revises regular verb forms in simple past. It’s target level is A1-A2. The exercises also revise vocabulary linked to ‘restaurants’, a lexical field students are often exposed to even at lower levels while traveling. The short video to watch is the end scene of the animated Disney/Pixar film ‘Ratatouille’. There are also materials included to practice pronunciation of the -ed ending and spelling.

FREE TEST-BANK: TEST-ENGLISH

/ A1, A2, B1, B2, Exam training, Grammar training, Teachers

December 2020 – When I started teaching online I kept going back to one website to test my students’ grammar knowledge in test-teach-test approach. At the beginning, it was a simple blog, however, it has grown up to a prodigious test bank. Today, I invite you to visit the TEST-ENGLISH website.

WUP EXERCISE: TWO THINGS WE HAVE IN COMMON

/ A2, B1, B2, C1, Lesson tips, Teachers

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).

Spice up your ESL lessons with songs

/ A1, A2, B1, B2, Grammar training, Lesson tips, Listening training, Teachers, Vocabulary training

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.

ONLINE REVIEWS IN AN ESL LESSON

/ A2, B1, B2, Reading Training, Speaking and Conversation, Teachers

When we think about reading, we picture books, newspapers or magazines. However, your students probably read daily texts that are shorter, more about consumption and not (only) about entertainment or current affairs, and are more packed with information. Let me give you a simple example how to train them to find and read this type of texts in real life and some tasks to customize for your lesson, with the aim to improve reading for details. Use online reviews in your ESL lesson.

ESL FILM QUIZ – A2/B1: THE HOLIDAY

/ A2, B1, Christmas, Listening training, Teachers, Vocabulary training

Movies offer a wide range of benefits to students: even if they have already seen the film in their first language, by watching it in another language will teach them how to listen and catch first words, then phrases, finally complete sentences. With subtitles, they teach vocabulary and pronunciation patterns, however, it becomes more a reading task. With an ESL film quiz, it can be even done in self-study mode. This time a romantic comedy for Christmas at A2/B1 level: THE HOLIDAY.