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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

There’s a new twitter based application on the web that you don’t have to sign up to twitter to use:  Tweetolife.  It’s the outcome – well, it’s one outcome of the development of Twitter corpus data by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, whose paper on the subject is available to read as pdf. Tweetolife can show you which genders use ...

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 ...

The visual thesaurus was pointed out to me some time ago as a great alternative to the standard online dictionary search, and also as a great way to help learners broaden their vocabulary, particularly with higher level students who have a tendency to rely on a more limited than necessary lexical resource. But….  I’ve tended not to use it because ...

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, ...