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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Giving feedback on classroom tasks is a tricky thing to come up with ideas for.  Broadly, I think methods can be broken down into Collaborative / Competitive / Partial / Full.  The four methods can interact, so you can have competitive partial feedback, followed by collaborative full feedback – or vice versa. Collaborative methods might involve ...