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 ...

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 ...

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 entry for everyone currently working at an ELT summer school somewhere in the world!  It’s not always easy and there’s a lot of hard work – hopefully this post will help out a bit!  I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy my summer school experiences immensely over the years and one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing most has been the project ...

This is a great activity that you can use as a warmer or as a fun practice task in a number of situations. I should acknowledge that I originally saw my Dip tutor Peter Moran do this during a lesson in Wroclaw in 2006 – in various forms it’s been one of my staple activities ever since! I can’t remember why Peter did this – though as I recall he ...

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 ...

Here’s another overview of an FCE Writing lesson: The lesson is based around the idea of a model text – in this case a “bad” model (which I really enjoyed writing!). In brief: (1)  Write the word “REPORT” up on the board and ask learners, in three or four groups,  to think of as many good things to do in a report as possible.  [these will ...

It’s almost exam time again – hence the recent trend in teflgeek posts!  So here’s a lesson on CAE writing, (though with some slight adaptation it’ll work for FCE / CPE as well). At this stage, it’s probably best used as a general organisation and presentation review lesson, reminding learners what the different text types should look like and ...

Spotted on Carla Arena’s Collablogatorium - Superlame! is a tool that lets you upload photos (currently only from your PC – no URL grabs) and add speech bubbles, thought bubbles and suchlike.  With some creative use of the speech bubble boxes, you can also create captions. SuperLame! Comic Word Balloons, Speech Bubbles, and Thought Balloons, ...