YL ONLINE LESSON PLAN – Daily routines

/ A1, Pre-A1, Teachers, Young Learners

January 2021 – Online lessons with Young Learners are challenging for many reasons: apart from problems with internet connection, tired eyes and the demotivating fact of not being really together with their peers, it also forces kids into a very passive sitting life style. You need to consider that kids are usually not really comfortable with opening different types of documents (pdf, doc, etc.) and it is also difficult for the teacher to monitor their written work (checking for spelling mistakes, for instance). In this post, I’d like to propose a lesson plan to teach daily routines to kids online,

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

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: Work-out & gym vocabulary

/ B1, B2, Teachers, Vocabulary training

December 2020 – This is a multi-skill lesson plan teaching and revising vocabulary linked to the topics ‘gym’ and ‘work-out’. It follows the methodology of the so-called ‘flipped classroom’. Students are expected to do some pre-lesson task and the lesson is based on this pre-study.

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.