Search results matching tags 'vocabulary' and 'writing'

960. My students like stories

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:54:00 GMT

Yesterday I implemented the following activity with my adult students – all of them are retired people that wish to learn English for traveling and visiting different countries.

Basically it was a listening activity, but it also had speaking and reading parts. It requires several steps. We have not finished yet – I expect tomorrow or on coming days. We’re enjoying the activity, and they like stories I invent.

Yesterday I started by writing some words and phrases from the text of a worksheet, so as to do a pre-listening exercise. On the whiteboard I wrote some words like: Katherine Stinson, sailboat, around the world, alone, dangerous, dangers in the ocean. We were discussing them so they could make kind of an idea about the story.

After that I read the story aloud, number by number.

After that step I handed out worksheets with the story, and again I read the story aloud, and we discussed and clarified some points of the story. They were writing notes of vocabulary. And they asked me many questions about some words that were new to them. I got amazed they had understood the story while I was reading it aloud for the first time.

I would say this was learning and even something of acquisition.

Of course you can use the worksheet if it’s any useful. / Photo from: sampedrosun com. Painting-by-Terryl-Godoy-Man-at-Work-4

Worksheet # 145

The Unbelievable Story of Katherine Stinson

February 4, 2013

1. Katherine Stinson is a courageous and brave woman. At 23 she has been the first woman in sailing around the earth completely alone. She states her guardian angel has been an allied friend though.

2. She sailed off from Hawking Harbor, on January 2, 2013, close to New York City.

3. Her sailboat / sailing boat was about 80 ft (24.38 meters) long.

4. The mast was around 20 meters high.

5. During her trip around the world she has faced two strong storms, waves 10 yards high, but on the other hand she had to suffer some dead calms.

6. The firm Lucky Strike has been the main sponsor: they have invested $ 6,000. Its logotype was painted on the big sail.

7. She could keep in touch with her manager, Ray Branson, all the time, by radio and with the help of communication satellites.

8. She could count on him.

9. In case she was in a dreadful situation, up to the point she could perish because of a storm or a crevice in the skull for example, she could call Ray Branson, and this person would send powerful large motor boats to rescue her.

10. There were about 50 points along the route where those large motor boats could set off at once.

11. Moreover, in other hazardous or dangerous circumstances for her, Mr. Branson would send a helicopter to rescue her. She had GPS (Global Positioning System).

12. It’s a relief she achieved the harbor of New York after 28 days. She has suffered diseases, storms, fog… but she says the most dreadful thing is solitude.

13. Oh, I’ve got to say that Ray is her husband. He was one of the people that received and welcomed her, together with their kids / children, Kevin and Sarah and many other people.

The Best Online Tools For Using Photos In Lessons

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 04:05:05 GMT

One of my more popular “The Best…” lists is The Best Ways To Use Photos In Lessons. Though that list includes several online tools, I recently realized I hadn’t included many that I use and have previously posted about. So, … Continue reading →

Neat Stuff: 8-26-12

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 14:42:49 GMT

===================================== Mac OSX Tech Tip ===================================== Many Mac OSX applications use a pop up fonts window to allow you to format font appearance. By default, you don’t get to see a preview of the font. If you click and hold on the little dot in the top-middle of that window and drag downward, a [...]

Expo Markers

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Most of the time dry erase markers are boring, normally most teachers use green, black, red, and blue. But, sometimes there are unique things to do with Expo markers.

Make notes on your bathroom mirror
Make a pocket sized white board: put clear packing tape on a piece of paper or index card and write and erase.
Write vocabulary words on your shower door.
Write on your car's windshield, put information you need on the corners out of the direct sight of the vehicle.
You can use it to remove permanent marker.
Write down goals on the corners and check them off as you get done.

One great YouTube video I found is how to make an Expo marker light. This will freak your students out if you turn out the light during your presentation and use the expo marker as a light instead of a real expo marker.

Word Cubes

Anonymous — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:00:00 GMT

As a teacher you walls can get covered quickly and most districts require all teachers to have a word wall. Well I am saying take back your walls. Don't rebel from word walls, they are incredibly effective for vocabulary and writing. But, most teachers have plenty of space in their classroom on their ceilings.
For example:

,but have them in your classroom and have the week or unit's vocabulary written on them. Word walls teach important principles about words and how they work. Word walls foster reading and writing and provide a visual map to help students remember connections between words and concepts.

The Twelve Days of Geekmas: Nine pretty pictures (#eltpics)

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:13:20 GMT

On the ninth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me: nine pretty pictures

Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration! Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way:

12 blogs worth clutching

11 tips for writing

10 tricks for reading

And nine pretty pictures – or rather some ideas to use with images and some images to use with them!

All of the pictures used below in this post have come from the excellent #eltpics Flickr photostream and are reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) licence.

potential by @hartle

(1) Make me a story – using either a single image or with a series of images (which can give a greater degree of support), learners come up with a story based on the image(s). By using superlame to add speech bubbles and captions, and by being creative with the windows snipping tool, it is possible to create comic book sequences. But pen and paper can also work!

Decorated bicycles at Children's Perahara, Tangalle, Sri Lanka, July 2010 by @CliveSir

(2) Caption Competition - take in a series of images, ideally one per learner in the class, but fewer if you have a large class, and stick them up around the room. Chop some scrap A4 into sentence sized strips so that each learner has one strip per picture. So, if you have 12 learners and 12 pictures up, you’ll need 144 strips of paper… Or you could just give each learner 4 strips of paper, which would be quicker and more manageable. Learners move around the room independently and when they feel inspired by a picture, they write a caption for it on one of their strips of paper. Captions don’t need to be humorous (though they can be!). After a set amount of time, collect all the strips back in and redistribute them, making sure learners don’t have any of their original strips. Learners then try to stick the captions up next to the picture they think it refers to. This can then be followed up with learners checking to see whether their captions got put in the right place or not and explaining why they wrote what they wrote. Plus any language feedback.

Knitting and crocheting-Huayhuash, Peru by @VictoriaB52

(3) Role play Prompts I saw this done in a session a couple of years ago – I sadly can’t remember who gave the session or what it was on… - but I remember the activity. Using a picture of Van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Marriage”, we put ourselves in the positions of the people in the painting and then came up with questions to ask each other, which then lead into a sort of role play as we acted out being the people in the pictures. It was great fun and a really nice way of helping learners to access imagery, particularly for learners about to do exam speaking tasks involving pictures.

Street market, Copacabana, Bolivia by @sandymillin

(4) Labeltastic Something that occurred to me as an incredibly simple and effective way of using pictures, which I confess I’ve not used yet – the create-your-own picture dictionary. Most vocabulary lessons are based around a topic, so why not simply find a picture of that topic and give copies to the learners to stick into their notebooks so that they can add lots of little arrows and labels, thus creating their own lexically organised picture dictionaries?

(5) Mind Mapping In a similar vein, the idea of using mind mapping techniques with images can extend the labelling idea. With the mind map, you could not only access the key vocabulary items, but also access learners’ emotional reactions to the images and learners’ speculation on the content and individuals in those pictures. Thanks to @acliltoclimb for the inspiration from his post “Every Picture tells a Story“.

Easter in Seville. The park to themselves. by @europeaantje

(6) Dictadraw A very simple premise, but a nice way to revise vocabulary and practice / develop picture description skills. Essentially, you give different pictures to different learners in a pair. They take turns to describe their pictures to each other and as one partner describes, the other one draws. At the end of the activity, they compare their ideas. Obviously the object isn’t to create a perfect replica – particularly if you do use a photograph! I use this activity more with appearance vocabulary (he has red hair and a big nose) than with anything else, but it can also work with photos – as long as they aren’t too complex!

ET, come home! by @AClilToClimb

(7) Speculation Using bizarre, odd or unclear imagery can be fun ways of introducing and practicing modals of speculation and deduction. If you can’t find any pictures that you think are sufficiently bizarre (or likely to lead to enough speculation) then a simple remedy is to take a picture of a mundane everyday item and zoom in really really close on one particular aspect of it, and ask the learners to guess what it is. For example, the milled edge of a coin or the underneath of a pepper grinder could prove fruitful!

Browsing by @sueannan

(8) Expert Witness another old favourite – a memory game where learners look at an image for one minute, the image is then removed (removing the image also removes the temptation to peek!), and learners then have to recall the scene. With low levels / ages, this can be a Q&A session based on “Is there a ___? / Are there any ___? ” to revise a particular vocab set. For higher levels, it could be situated in a police interview scenario, the learner witnessed an incident (for example in the photo on the right “Browsing”, they could have witnessed a theft) and has to describe the scene. Or it could be run as a straight listing activity – learners look at the image for a minute and then have a further minute to list all the items they remember seeing in the picture.

(9) Selection In This is another fairly obvious one – it might require raiding the school flashcard / image files as it works best with a large amount of pictures. For a more structured task though, it might be best to generate a handout with a limited selection of images. In simple terms learners select the “best” image or images for a particular purpose, e.g. to include in a tourist brochure of the area / to put on the front page of an nature magazine (etc). This is a fairly simple task and one that mimics exam speaking tasks at FCE, CAE & CPE (sort of) – so would be good practice for prospective candidates. A twist on this is to ask the learners to select three or four similar pictures and to generate their own selection task for another group of learners to perform – they could then give feedback on performance.

Hot Air Balloon by @mrsdkrebs

street painting by Jane Arnold

Stand By Me, Japan

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:53:00 GMT

This is a good an excuse as any to listen to a good song, and, at the same time, be reminded of the suffering the great nation had to endure earlier this year. Why not use this video as a springboard for a class discussion on natural disasters, for example? You might like to read this post on activities using songs.

741. Writing about really interesting topics

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:03:00 GMT

One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “Writing texts is one sheerly great way to begin to express students’ ideas in English.

As well it’s a way to develop their thinking capability, because the students have to invest an effort, an attractive one, to sort out the ideas they wish to communicate with you and his or her classmates. One example: they’ve read a text about sex discrimination.

From the beginning, I would tell you, the students should make up sentences by using the words and grammar they’re learning lately; this could be a starting point to actually think in English, and so not translating from Spanish.

With some experience you will learn how to rope your students in an interesting topic they like, perhaps because you’ve commented about it, and they tried to give their own ideas, trying hard to utter them in English, while you might be helping them with the vocabulary they don’t know.

Don’t focus on correcting the grammar mistakes at this stage: let them talk about what they think.

You can provide them with prompts to speak out by asking them really interesting questions about the topic. Also you can say sentences about the text and then ask them whether they’re true or false.

I’m not going to say more things now about writing and discussing about a given topic. A lot of teachers have done it and you’ll find their vision of those processes of speaking and writing in the Internet and books. I’ve already told you further things in this blog.” / Photo from: blog nj com. girl writing

Halloween Teaching Resources

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:30:36 GMT

I’m not a great fan of “festivals” teaching in general, but this year my timetable has more young learner classes than usual and halloween is almost upon us, so here’s what I managed to find to help you cook up some devilish lessons for your learners…

ESL-Galaxy has it’s usual great selection of flashcards, crosswords, wordsearches here: http://www.esl-galaxy.com/holiday.html.

Weird and wacky fun (usually involving carved pumpkins) pictures can be found here: http://www.funnyhalloweenpictures.com/ - though it should be stressed not all the pictures are classroom safe – teachers will need to select carefully beforehand!

Bogglesworld has absolutely masses of halloween related stuff here http://bogglesworldesl.com/halloween_worksheets.htm - almost too much to go through! But I think the one I’ll be using from here is the “Are you a werewolf, witch or vampire?“

LearnEnglishKids from the British Council has some great resources, including fun computer games, quizzes, short stories and a story maker http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/category/topics/halloween.

Katie, posting on teflogue.com has a scary urban legends reading race that might be suitable for higher / older levels.

People who are already registered with TES will know they have a huge range of halloween related resources - people who aren’t might want to register! Remember though, that not everything is designed with EFL in mind.

Spotted yesterday on efl-resource – a link to some fantastic online young learner halloween resources: monster creation, spooky stories and halloween e-cards: say “Boo” to Ozge Karaoglu’s blog!

Finally, Sean Banville has a Breaking News English lesson plan on the news that the world population is set to hit seven billion on halloween: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1110/111025-world_population.html - which also links back to my post of the other day: Global Population – 7 billion people and you.

Have fun!

Global Population – 7 billion people and you

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:15:59 GMT

There’s a really nice app on the BBC website that lets you figure out where you come in the global population statistics – for example, when I was born I was the four billionth, 50 millionth, seven hundred and sixty four thousandth, one hundred and sixty first person alive on the planet. It goes on to let you look at country population statistics and average life expectancy. Check it out here: BBC News – 7 billion people and you: Whats your number?.

The app is based (primarily) on data from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) , who have their own app at http://www.7billionandme.org/. This asks you for more detailed information, not only your date of birth, but birth location, current location and such like, but it does then break down the data into a much wider spread of infographics that compare the situation back then, with the way things are now. Anyone who’s helping learners work with describing trends and/or numbers (big numbers!) would find this a useful place to go to get some personalised data for the learners to work with.

Also on the web via UNFPA, is http://www.7billionactions.org which is hoping to inspire people to take positive actions in their communities and around the world. One of the more powerful ways they hope to achieve this is by people sharing their stories: 7 billion stories. There is a registration form to complete (the usual) and you need a picture to upload. Participants also need to be 13 years old or over. Then you write a 600 character “story” about yourself and how you hope to influence change, give it a title and go!

It seems like there’s a fairly obvious lesson plan there! The kicker though, is that it is only 600 CHARACTERS – not words! So learners will need to be concise! It may also help learners to look at the existing stories to get a better idea of the type of content that’s expected of them.

Worth a look anyway! At the time of writing, the world’s population stands at 6, 999, 175, 608. So be quick if you want to get there in time for 7 billion!