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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Just a quick lesson overview rather than a full plan etc today:  this is an idea for helping learners with comparisons / comparatives. Basically it starts out with the activity “Tea or Coffee”, follows up with the language input stage, invites comparisons between learners’ home country and the UK / USA etc and finishes off with an oppostion ...

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 ...

I spotted a colleague (Thanks Neil!) using this with a class the other day and it looked brilliant and so investigated – it is really impressive work! Turns out Neil spotted this on Larry Ferlazzo’s site. The Curfew game is aimed at young adults / older teenagers and is set in a dystopian Britain, some 16 years in our future.  It aims to raise ...

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know much about Habitat for Humanity.  I’m mentioning them here because they posted a comment under one of the blog posts and I just went and took a quick look at their site. They have quite a wealth of lessons (detailed plans, learning outcomes, materials etc), categorised by age ranges.  The bad news is that these ...

An interesting post by Deborah Capras on the Business Spotlight blog relating to Microsoft’s recent billion dollar purchase of Skype.  She raises the question: Doesn’t $8.5 billion seem a lot of money for a verb I use almost every day for free? Which is a really good question and got me thinking….   How much are words ...

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, ...

The Guardian newspaper recently ran a series of short stories related to oil, as part of a project to commemorate the one year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster – (see BBC story for background). Called “Oil Stories“, the Guardian project contains eight short stories from different authors that seek to examine our relationship with ...