It’s not until someone goes that you realise the impact they had on your life – Steve Jobs was one of those public figures who inspired belief and achievement in others. One of my classes was asking if we could talk about Steve Jobs and his life, and clearly he meant a lot to a lot of people – so here are some resources that you can use with your ...

I just came across, during a further exploration of the Pearson ELT Community site, their idioms discussions space. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of discussion, but they have posted a set of mini-videos which purport to explain English idioms and expressions.  The videos are very short (about a minute) and are followed with a ...

Following on from the recent blog challenge on raising awareness of disability access issues, I came across the Leonard Cheshire Disability campaign whilst watching Shaun the Sheep dvds with my daughter. The campaign is called “Creature Discomforts” and has very similar aims to the blog challenge – namely to get people to think about the way ...

A couple of weeks ago I posted in response to Marisa Constantinides’ Tefl Matters Blog Challenge - an awareness raising lesson on disability access for EFL/ESL learners. What I have here is possibly more in the spirit of the original challenge, as it looks more specifically at mobility access issues. Lead In by asking learners about their days, ...

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook….. There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, ...

I first watched Ken Robinson’s TED talk – “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” some months ago – a thought provoking examination of the aims of the educational establishment.  It has influenced my thinking about the aims of teaching quite heavily, though perhaps more on this in a later post. It occurred to me that this would be a nice talk to use with a ...

This is a lesson aimed more at pre-intermediate / intermediate level learners that “introduces” SHOULD and SHOULDN’T.  Though it can be used to revise the language point if learners have met it previously! It is based around using Should / Shouldn’t for expressing advice within the “good idea” “bad idea” range – obviously this is not the only use ...