The wonderful StoryCorps stories on NPR are great pieces to read and listen to on the radio. They also have converted a number of them into short video animations, and many of them (though not the one I’ve embedded below) … Continue reading →

The Chinese New Year: From Fear to Festivity is the title of this video from English Central that I’m adding to The Best Resources For Chinese New Year. More importantly, though, it’s the first English Central video that I’m embedding … Continue reading →

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 ...

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 ...

It’s the end of the school year at the moment and most of my classes have been badgering for “Movie, teacher! Movie!” for some time.  Resistance would seem to be futile…. Basically, what they want to do is sit down and watch a film for the entirety of the lesson, “practising” their listening skills, but otherwise doing nothing.  The pedagogical ...

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, ...

With so much literature, grammar, writing, and vocabulary to cover in our curriculum these days, it’s easy to overlook the importance of oral language in our classrooms.  Consider also how reluctant many students already are about “getting up in front of the class,” and it’s easy to put off teaching about speeches and oral presentations.   But ...

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 ...

YouTube offers you so many opportunities to learn English and also to learn how to do new things, learn how to do things better or teach others how to do things. In today's activity we'll look at some 'home' produced YouTube channels and learn a bit more about how to use make up and other cosmetics and develop your vocabulary in this area. We'll ...

Learning English from songs lyrics and music is a great way to study. In today's activity you are going to be able to watch and enjoy some simple 'stop motion' animated music videos and then find out how to create your own. The videos for you to watch come from two sources; Music and Muffins and SereneRhapsody and you can find more examples on ...