On the fifth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me:  FIVE FAVOURITE THINGS 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 9 pretty pictures 8 talks worth ...

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 ...

Trying to come up with new and interesting ways of saying the same old thing is a skill that taxes most of us on a daily basis:  ”I like your hair.”  ”Your hair looks nice.”  ”Wow!  Have you had your hair done?”  ”That new style really suits you!” For language learners, it’s obviously even more difficult.  For learners preparing for exam classes, ...

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 ...

If you’ve had time to look at recent posts on this blog, you’ll have noticed a series of “first lesson” ideas and activities…  after all,  it’s September, we’ve all got “back-to-school-itis”! Stepping back from the plethora of great teaching ideas to fill the class time, today our guest blogger, Dave Tucker, looks at some broader learning and ...

Inspired by a recent feature on The Guardian website, which invites readers to share their memories of where they were and what they were doing (click here for more detail), I was thinking about collating teaching resources on the topic and presenting them here. Turns out Larry Ferlazzo‘s beaten me to it… His latest post:  ”Even more 9/11 ...

Back in July I posted a selections of 20 ideas and activities that might be worth trying out as you get to know your new classes this school year – and since then there’ve been a couple of additional ideas to throw into the mix: First Lesson Ideas / Warmers First Lesson: Find Nobody Who… First Lesson: I don’t know what you did last ...

I spotted this one on a post on the TeachingEnglish | British Council facebook page – who in turn spotted it on the Voxy Blog. The infographic below comes out of the work of Mark Prensky and his concepts of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants – and looks how digital natives might fit into existing education systems (or not as the case may ...

A very quick alternative to the standard composition task “What I did on my Summer holidays”. Essentially, you ask the learners to write the composition (100 words? I guess length will be age & level dependent) about somebody else in the class. I think I’ve blogged a similar activity at some point before, but not sure when.  Anyway, the key to ...

This is an alternative approach to the inevitable “what did you do on your holidays” conversation.   Many first lesson activities and ideas are based on the premise that nobody knows anybody else but often the students in your classes have come up through the levels together and the only new person in the group is you… It should also combat those ...