My Life In 20 Lines - a simple storytelling activity

Here's a simple idea for practicing the past simple with lower level students. I got it from Quora, a website that allows its users to ask and answer each other questions. Unlike other similar sites, you are required to sign up to get access, resulting in a higher calibre of contributions. If you're interested in the big questions, I recommend signing up. Quora users were asked to share their life story in twenty lines, and I thought this would be a great practice for my pre-intermediate classes. Asking them to create a story to practice the past simple can be difficult for some learners as...

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Songs In The Key Of ELT: Don't Worry About The Government

Here's a funny thing. Despite music being my number one passion and hobby in life, I've never once written about it here on my blog. In fact, I don't tend to make a big thing out of it in my teaching either. Well, I plan on changing both those things, starting here with a new strand on my blog, Songs In The Key of ELT. But as is my way, I won't be using the most obvious songs and artists. They are obviously so many songs and types of music to choose from, so I'm going to find tracks by artists that are not as obvious as the ones you normally find in ELT materials. First up, appropriately...

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Cheat!

Here's a lesson idea I came up the other day. I was trying to spice up a rather dry FCE coursebook reading on animal cheats so I decided to add a video to the mix. After figuring out these activities, I realised that I wasn't so much improving the reading activity as I was replacing it with a listening, so I changed direction and did something else. But rather than waste all that hard work, I thought I'd share it with you here instead... 1) In groups, ask the students to list all the things they think of when they think of the word 'cheat'. 2) Put their answers on the board in a mind...

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My Talk At RSCON4

My co-presenters during RSCON4 I had the great pleasure of presenting at the RSCON4 conference on the 13th of October. It was an online global event highlighting “wow” moments in teaching and learning, and the entire conference was held online. I'd like to thank all of the organisers for putting together such an amazing event, everyone who came, and my moderator Malu Sciamarelli.Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend many sessions as I was travelling, but I will always remember giving my presentation. I had to do my talk from a hotel room in the rainforest of Costa Rica, and five minutes before...

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P Is For Bacon

Crispy A couple of weeks I hosted a workshop at my school on the subject of parsnips. Parsnip is an acronym standing for the subjects that coursebook writers are allegedly supposed to avoid: Politics Alcohol Religion Sex Narcotics Isms Pork We had a really interesting discussion on the subject, looking into the reasons behind why this happens and the result of this decision to omit what many people would consider to be some of the fundamental building blocks of life. For our homework, we took a parsnip each and created an activity which we could share in the following week's workshop....

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A North Korea Q&A

Last month Ann Loseva, a fellow teacher in Moscow, asked me to answer some questions from one of her students about North Korea. She asked me because I visited the country in 2010 and had written about it for the travel website Global Grasshopper. She had used the article with her student who wanted to know more, so together they made a list of questions and sent them over to me.I'm certainly no expert, but since I've been there, I did my best to answer the questions. I decided to answer the questions in a video, and since I'd gone to the effort of making it, I thought I'd might as well...

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Silent Movies - The BELTA Day Special Edition

Just before the workshop... On June 1st, BELTA (the teaching association of which I am president) held its first ever national conference. We were delighted with how it went, the speakers were fantastic and the delegates were enthusiastic participants. I’m already looking forward to next year. On the day, I hosted a workshop based on the Silent Movies series of posts on my website. I showed four movies to the participants and asked them to share their ideas in groups for how they would use each of the films. I didn’t set any parameters, they were free to think of any idea they thought was...

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A Classroom Full of Poets

Poetry is one of those things I rarely use in class, but whenever I have, I’ve got a great reaction from the students. For example, my Korean teachers loved making their own stem poems. This involved them completing sentences to describe their classmates which became a poem. However asking someone to just write a poem could be a very intimidating thing to do, so I always try to limit the activity and place parameters on it so they can create without that pressure. So I’m always on the lookout for a way of introducing poetry into the class in a way that feels natural and doesn’t place...

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Professional Development - Not An Option

This post was first written as a comment on the blog of the Secret DoS. To read the interesting article that prompted it and the discussion that followed, including my original comment, click here. I have adapted the comment for this blog post. Conferences are just one of the many PD options  I can never understand why some people think professional development (PD) should be optional. If we want to consider ourselves a profession, and I do, then we have to act like one. Why is it that teachers should be allowed the right to do their training, get a job and then coast for the...

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