Articles tagged ‘Classroom Activities’
Wikipedia In Class
By Katie | January 11th, 2008 |
3 Comments »
A creative teacher at the ESL café - Leigh Thelmadatter - had a neat idea for an interactive writing activity: organize a lesson or series of lessons where your students participate in editing a Wikipedia page on something they are uniquely qualified to speak on. The theme would vary based on your own students, [...]
Teaching Prepositions
By Katie | November 28th, 2007 | 5 Comments »
When I google or yahoo “teaching prepositions” and “preposition games” I don’t find much that I would be able to use in a communicative-ish class of adults. Much is geared towards kids – often native English speaking kids – and much consists of written practice (which is not at all hard to find by paging [...]
Activities For Revising Or Practicing Tenses
By Katie | November 27th, 2007 | Add a Comment »
In my experience, as long as you plan well, it’s fairly easy to present tenses but much harder to find good communicative practice. You can present present perfect without talking, you can teach past continuous without your left shoe (and don’t get me wrong, students will enjoy this!) but you don’t need a drawn-out [...]
Top 10 Teaching Tenses Do’s and Dont’s
By Katie | November 27th, 2007 | Add a Comment »
Do use timelines. [Unfortunately, I cannot find an example online of the type of timeline my CELTA trainers showed me; if anyone else can it would be very welcome. For the record, I am definitely not talking about this kind of timeline. While it is useful for a teacher or advanced learner, [...]
101 Uses For Spam In Class
By Katie | October 7th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
I’ve been fortunate to receive some spam with hilarious subjects in the last few months. I don’t actually open the email, but how can you not love “Free laptop, Katie [email address]” “Free lemon soda for Katie” and best of all “aggregator peanut butter banana bread”.
I came across a marvelous suggestion for spam once: [...]
Learn Each Others’ Names Or Else!
By Katie | September 13th, 2007 | Add a Comment »
I’m not usually an advocate of violence, nor would I like to imagine the TEFL Logue as some kind of cookbook for student abuse. So I’ll distance myself from the activity I’m about to present by letting you know that it was a Belgian colleague who either came up with it or passed it [...]
Top 10 Do’s And Dont’s For The New School Year
By Katie | September 4th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
September is known around the world, or at least around the northern hemisphere, as the start of the new school year. I usually get that “something smells school-y in the air” feeling when this month rolls around. I also routinely get the new school year jitters. I can’t say I’m an expert at [...]
Pangrams And Spoonerisms: Adapting English Language Trivia For Class
By Katie | August 24th, 2007 | Add a Comment »
There were some fun English language trivia in The Daily Mail. I would preface this by saying: In a class with a syllabus to cover and limited time, I would probably use these only as fillers, or as some fun but still English-related cooler after students have just finished working intensively.
The first page – [...]
Fun With Dictation
By Katie | August 14th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
It doesn’t sound like a very nice activity, first of all because, you know, Stalin and his ilk bring an unpleasant connotation to dictating and such, but even its normal teaching meaning, “dictation” smacks of the past. A traditional schoolmarm reading out a long speech for students to copy down word for word, to [...]
Teaching Listening From The Yemen Times And An ELT Notebook
By Katie | August 6th, 2007 | Add a Comment »
Sometimes I feel like I am idea-d out on new classroom tips and activities to post, having shared many of them here already. So I’m always glad to see the practical tips of others, especially when they appear in my inbox thanks to Google News Alerts. The latest catch is an article about [...]
