I’ve just created these powerpoint slides based on some brainstorming we did in class today. What would you do with them? I’ll try to update the post later with what I do with them after the lesson tomorrow!
(You can download it by clicking ‘slideshare’ and logging in – it’s free to create an account, and you can link via facebook if you want to.)
I know it’s a little late for this year, but I thought I’d post this for anyone who wants to use it in the future. I taught the lesson to Upper Intermediate students, and it took about one hour 45 minutes.
Start off by eliciting the prepositions you need to describe a photo: at the bottom, at the top, in the middle, on the left, on the right, in the (top-left…) corner.
Put students in pairs. Give each student in the pair one of the two photos below. One student describes, the other draws. Afterwards, they compare the drawing and the original picture and try to decide what is going on, and what connects the two pictures.
(You can download it by clicking ‘slideshare’ and logging in – it’s free to create an account, and you can link via facebook if you want to.)
Put these questions on the board:
Challenge students to guess what the answers to these questions might be. If they have no idea about Pancake Day (which they probably don’t!), encourage them to make it up. Then ask them if they want to know the answers – my students immediately shouted ‘yes’! Give them this text to read, adapted from the excellent Woodlands Junior School website:
Answer any questions students might have – mine weren’t quite clear on the explanation of Shrove Tuesday. Ask them if they know how to make pancakes. Then give them this recipe, cut up, and ask them to put it in order:
I downloaded the original recipe from the Times Educational Supplement website which has thousands of resources created by school teachers in the UK for their students, quite a few of which are suitable for EFL/ESL learners. The recipe is here, entitled ‘Posters and Displays’. Read the original recipe, or hand it out, for students to check their answers. They have lots of other Pancake Day resources too (just run a search, making sure ‘Resources’ is selected). You need to join the website to be able to download things, but it’s completely free.
Go back to the photos from the beginning of the lesson. Ask students what is happening in the first photo (the pancake race). Why do they think people are running with pancakes? Tell them this is a very old tradition. They should read about it and find out when it started, why it is still done today, and what the connection with the USA is:
If you have video access, you can then show them this video of an unusual pancake race which takes place every year. They should find out who is competing and why. You could give them more support with the video, but I ran out of preparation time!
To round off the work on Pancake Day, ask students to put all of their paper away, then try and remember as much as they can about the traditions connected to Shrove Tuesday.
As a follow-up, students could talk/write about ‘unusual’ traditions in their country/city.
After class, I went home and made pancakes. Here’s one in the pan 
Photo by @sandymillin, shared on http://flickr.com/eltpics
It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, and although I don’t normally do anything for it, I thought that this year I would take the opportunity to share one of my favourite poems with my students. Here’s the plan in case you want to do it too.
Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @vale360, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Ask your students what day it is, and whether anything special happens on this day in their country. What do they know about Valentine’s Day in the UK?
What kind of gifts do people normally give for Valentine’s Day? Brainstorm them on the board.
Give each group the word cloud. They decide what links the words in the cloud and what she is sending her Valentine. They can also look up any words they don’t understand, so they are ready to appreciate the poem as a whole later.
Show them an onion. What connection could this have to Valentine’s Day and the poem?
Ask the students to close their eyes and put their heads on the desk (but try not to fall asleep!). Read them the poem – take your time and savour the words.
Ask them to discuss how similar the poem was to their ideas. They can then read it and decide whether they would like to receive an onion as a Valentine.
You can then do some pronunciation/speaking work. Read the poem again. This time students mark where you pause using slashes.
They talk about why you pause in those places – it’s because of line/stanza breaks, and also phrases within the lines.
They can chose whether to read Valentine, or an anti-Valentine poem. You can find lots of them on the net. This is the one I chose:
In groups with other students who have chosen the same poem, they practise reading it. They decide where the pauses should be, how fast to read it, how to space the phrases…and then some of the braver students perform it to the class, or the whole group performs the poem together (providing their patterns aren’t too different).
Happy Valentine’s Day!
If you’ve never seen Wallace and Gromit, here’s a clip from ‘A Grand Day Out’, the programme which introduced them to the world and won the creators an Oscar:
I created this worksheet to revise infinitives of purpose with elementary students, and to share one of my favourite parts of British culture. It is designed to keep the students paying attention all the way through the episode. You can either give each student the whole sheet, or cut it in half so that you have two different worksheets. You may want to pre-teach some vocabulary, such as ‘rocket’, ‘match’, ‘drawer’, ‘escape’…
[To download, click ‘view on slideshare’. You have to log in, but it’s completely free. You should then be able to click on ‘download’ above the document.]
Apologies for the lack of numbers! The answers are:
Left half (in order as they appear in the episode)
To go to the moon.
To get cheese/To go on holiday.
To start the rocket./To light a match./To light a fuse./To get crackers.
To see what happens./To get something out./To open the drawer.
To ski
To escape from the robot.
Right half (in order as they appear in the episode)
To get some cheese.
To find a holiday./To organise a holiday.
To protect their eyes.
To catch the ball.
To get a telescope/a club/glue/paper./To put the cup in it.
To ski.
If you want to do more work with Wallace and Gromit in class, there are activity books accompanying a couple of the episodes, although I can only seem to find the one for The Wrong Trousers at the moment.
Enjoy!
While at IATEFL Glasgow 2012, I was lucky enough to see Khulood Al-balushi’s presentation, in which she shared various ideas for using movies with your students, as well as offering advice on how to choose suitable movies, especially important in the Kingdom of Bahrain, where she works as a Curriculum Specialist at the Ministry of Education. I asked her to share her ideas via my blog, and she agreed. Over to Khulood:
Since movies are a rich source for language learning and they are considered to be fun and enjoyable, here are some practical ideas that you can implement to make use of movies in the English Classroom:
This will help you motivate your students to watch and respond to the movie and can tell you if the movie is favored by the students. Otherwise you can look for a different movie.
You can make your students watch movie clips if the length of your lesson is short or if you intend to present a specific language skill such as reading, speaking, grammar or writing. The following are a few examples:
Of course, all of these activities can be modified based on your needs and your students.
By: Khulood Al-balushi
On Monday I had a cover class with an upper intermediate business group I had not met before. I decided to start with a word and see how the lesson developed. This was the result:
We started with just the word ‘business’ on the board. The class discussed what this word meant to them, then added the results to a brainstorm on the board. We talked about any problem vocab and added a few extra words. One student wrote ’Dow Jones’ so we added the names of other financial indexes and talked about how they worked. Using as much of the vocabulary on the board, students then worked in pairs to create a definition of business.
I then added a question mark, and the students talked about what business should be. They came up with five categories in which businesses should bear responsibility:
Each pair took responsibility for one category and brainstormed specific areas of responsibility within their category. We then set up an onion ring system. [One person from each pair stands in an inner ring facing out, and the other stands in an outer ring facing in. To start with everyone faces their original partner (from the previous activity). One ring then moves round to face the next person in the circle. They share ideas and try to add to them for a specific time, before the whole ring moves round to the next people. By the end of the activity, one person in the inner ring should have spoken to every person in the outer ring and vice versa.] After speaking to five people and hearing about all of the other categories, the pairs sat together again and fed back on what they head and anything which they added to their own category.
The final step in the lesson was to create a short mission statement based on the ideas. We had a quick look at Ben & Jerry’s mission statement and chose some useful sentence stems to put on the board. The pairs then turned their notes into sentences for the mission statement. I typed them up after class, and the resulting statement is now on the board, and below for you to see (click to enlarge):
You can also download a copy.
If I had continued to teach the class for longer, I might have used this mission statement as the first in a series of lessons in which we set up a class company. The mission statement would form the foundation of any ‘decisions’ we made during the project.
I did feel that although there was a lot of speaking and a little writing in this class it wasn’t as challenging as it could have been for an upper intermediate class. I would be grateful for any suggestions to improve it.
Last week I stumbled across an excellent photo article from the New York Times about immigrants to New York City and the objects they choose to bring with them. This is the lesson I created based on the article, but it is full of other possibilities too. I hope you find it useful, and I look forward to hearing what you decide to do with it.
I started off with the powerpoint presentation below. I displayed it on the interactive whiteboard, but you could print off the pictures and put them around the room instead. First, students were asked to speculate on what is in the pictures, and naturally they focus on the objects. Next, I asked them what links the pictures together, accepting any suggestions. I then told them that these were objects which immigrants to New York City brought with them. I then asked them to make notes about their thoughts on the gender, nationality, age, job and family of the owners of each object.
[To download, click ‘view on slideshare’. You may have to log in (not sure), but it’s completely free. You should then be able to click on ‘download’ above the document.]
I then gave the students the texts and asked them to read quickly to match each text to the photos. Some of them needed quite a lot of persuading to skim read and not try to understand everything!
You can find the correct answers by looking at the original article online. The students then had to check their predictions about the people by reading the text in a bit more detail. When a colleague reused the materials, she added a worksheet with a table with spaces for each item of information, which worked better than the notes which my students made.
In the penultimate step of the two-hour lesson, I divided the ‘stories’ up around the class, so that each pair of students had two people to read about. They had to create three to five questions about each person, not including the information we had already talked about (nationality, job etc) and write them down.
Finally, they mingled and asked the other students their questions.
For homework, I asked them to choose a story from the comments board, take notes on it and bring them to class the next day to tell the other students about.
A couple of days later I was working on relative clauses with the same class, and created the following gapfill to help them practise which relative pronoun to use:
The texts could also be used to practise narrative tenses, reported speech, time phrases and much more. You could also use it to lead into a discussion on immigration.
Enjoy!
Here’s a short worksheet I made for my FCE students to practise different forms of the infinitive ready for the Use of English Key Word Transformations.
We worked through it together and talked about the different forms – it does need a little more explanation than is given on the sheet. I used this webpage as inspiration for the sentences. It was one of the only ones I could find explaining more than just the base and perfect forms of the infinitive. If anyone has any other links or online exercises, please let me know.
Feel free to download the sheet and use it with your own students:
[To download, click ‘view on slideshare’. You may have to log in (not sure), but it’s completely free. You should then be able to click on ‘download’ above the document.]
Enjoy!
Today we were going to talk about jobs, write job adverts for the students’ dream jobs and then short letters applying for them. Instead we generated a lot of vocabulary, and did a lot of discussion, like so:
Students brainstormed jobs in pairs (they are upper intermediate/B2). While they were doing this, I typed words which appeared on more then one list into Tagxedo. After a few minutes they called out anything which was missing, and we came up with the following wordcloud:
Generally I would get them to do this on the whiteboard, but we were in a small classroom, and I had to choose between the whiteboard or IWB – I couldn’t arrange the classroom to be able to use both!
Next, I asked them to decide which two jobs from the selection above are the most difficult and to think of good reasons. They gave their reasons to the class, and we ended up with a list of seven jobs: fireman, doctor, president, thief, lawyer, policeman and [company] director.
Starting from this list, the students came up with a list of characteristics which you need to be good at these/your job(s). During this stage the students were all asking me for specific vocabulary which they wanted for certain characteristics. Again, I entered them into tagxedo and came up with this list.
We pushed the tables against the walls and they mingled to try to persuade each other that the two jobs they added to our list of seven were the most difficult, using the adjectives where appropriate. A couple of students did change their minds, and in the final vote fireman and doctor were the clear winners.
To finish the lesson, students wrote short descriptions starting with:
Tomorrow we’re going to compare the descriptions which they came up with and use these to create adverts for these two jobs. Then we will move on to students writing their own adverts as I originally planned to do today.
What worked
Students were constantly asking me for the specific words they needed to describe things, particularly personality adjectives.
Students were motivated and engaged in the topic.
Things to improve
The stage where the students mingled and tried to change the minds of the other students didn’t work as well as I hoped it would. Does anyone have a good alternative here?
I wrote this worksheet based on problems my students have been having with the FCE Writing Part 2 essay-writing task. Feel free to download it, use it with your own students and let me know what I need to change / improve. It fit onto five pages on my computer, but has expanded to six on slideshare. If you adjust the margins once you’ve downloaded, you’ll save a bit of paper!
[To download, click ‘view on slideshare’. You may have to log in (not sure), but it’s completely free. You should then be able to click on ‘download’ above the document.]
Here are the answers:
Essay writing checklist answers
Enjoy!
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Conferences: Spreading the Love
How to train students to use technology appropriately
Pronunciation: what, why, when and how?
Encouraging English in teen classrooms
What I learnt on #eltchat today (Materials / Online Professional Development)
