Happy Teacher´s Day!

Here in Spain this Friday is Teacher´s Day and I´m sure most of you (well, here in the Canaries at least!) will be heading towards the beaches for a well deserved long weekend of rest and relaxation.

The way teachers are viewed throughout the world varies a great deal, and I thought you might be interested to read this post I read from a Nepali teacher to wish his colleages a Happy Teacher´s Day.. as I do you!

Happy Teacher´s Day... from Nepal!

“Today was a different day for me because I am a teacher. I have been a teacher for more than twenty years. And every year this day adds fuel to my life as a teacher. The reason is today is Teacher´s Day in Nepal. It is celebrated by students on the full moon day of the Nepali month Ashad.

At seven in the morning, one of my former students made a surprise visit to my suburban home in Kathmandu. He came, wished me a Happy Teacher´s Day and gave me a bouquet of flowers and sweets. Though such things are not of much value in themselves, they became special on this particular day.

In the late morning and afternoon, I received so many text messages that I could not reply to them all. All the messages were best wishes from my dear students. One read: To wish you a great, prosperous, blissful, healthy, bright, energetic, terrific and extremely happy Teacher´s Day!! It brought out the love that this student had for me.

In Nepal, teachers are respected as gurus. So students either visit their teachers with flowers and sweets or organize a function at school to mark the day. They literally worship the teacher, placing him or her on a special chair, smearing red colour on the face, decorating them with garlands and offering them sweets. Some will recite poems and others will offer words of praise for their gurus”.

HAPPY TEACHER´S DAY, EVERYONE!!

Ideas for Developing the Mathematical Competence through English - for Reluctant English Teachers

I know..you´re an English teacher..so you hate maths, right? Most of us are pretty poor at maths, let´s be frank. However, that doesn´t mean to say we should neglect this area in class, and not cater for our "logical - mathematical" students. Here are a couple of fun ideas. Do you like them? Send me a message and I´ll publish more!

My favourite: Grey Elephants from Denmark.

Tell ss that you are going to read their minds and guess what they are going to tell you at the end of the activity. Write “Grey elephants from Denmark” on a piece of paper, without letting anyone see what you have written. Give ss the following instructions:

1. Think of a number between 2 to 10.
2. Multiply the number by 9.
3. Add the two numbers of the total together. (The answer will always be 9)
4. Take 5 away from your answer. (The answer will always be 4)
5. If your answer is 1, it equals A, if 2= B, if 3= c, if 4= D. (The answer will
always be D).
6. Think of a country in Europe beginning with D (only Denmark).
7. Think of an animal (not a fish or bird) beginning with the second letter of the country (almost always will be elephant!)
8. Think of the colour of your animal (Elephants are always grey, you are almost guaranteed to end up with grey elephants from Denmark).
9. Now show pupils your sentence!

Surveys: Free Time Pies

Ask each student to list their hobbies and to order them in terms of frequency. Ask them to draw a pie diagram, in which the different sectors represent hobbies, and the size of the sector represents frequency. The ss label the sections of the diagram with the names of the activities.

Then they write on another piece of paper a few sentences to describe their routines, eg. I sometimes go to the cinema; I always watch Peking Express on Sunday night, etc. Collect the pieces of paper and put them in a box or on the table. Display the pie diagrams around the room. Each student takes a piece of paper and reads it. They then have to find the matching pie chart and find the student who wrote the information. To do this, they have to circulate and look at the pie charts and then ask classmates about their hobbies, eg. When do you go to the cinema?

Quantifier Survey

Prepare a set of Quantifier Survey statements, which are a series of sentences with most, some of us, none of us, we all, etc… Give out the statements to each student or group of students. They read the statements. They have to find out if the statement is true, so they need to prepare questions to ask other students, eg. Do you live near here? They mingle and collect responses. They count the responses and decide if their statement is true. If not, they must write a new statement which is true for the class. Then each student or group reports their findings, eg. “19 out of 20 of us live within one kilometre of the school so it´s true to say most of us live near here”.

(Not) Personal Questions!

This is one of my favourite activities to practise question forming- but not the usual "What´s your name'" stuff, which we all get fed up with, don´t we!

It´s called Fruit and Veg.

Ask ss to write down the following words on a scrap of paper, keeping them secret from their peers:

the name of a fruit
the name of a vegetable
a number between 1 and 200.
the answer to this question: do you like football?
How many pens and pencils do you have?
What is the first thing you do every morning?

Now tell them that these things are actually:
their first name
their family name
their age
are they married?
how many children they have?
their job.

Now they must get up and go round the class, asking the personal questions and sharing info about their new selves.

Guaranteed hilarity!

Using Songs in Class

Students love listening to songs in class, don´t they?

The problem is, most of the activities you see are just gap fills, where students have to fill in the missing words. Here are a couple of my favourite song activities, which are more creative.

Song Drawing - elem +
Play the song, repeating as many times as necessary. As they listen, ss draw what they hear on their paper. You can suggest they use several colours in their drawings. When the song finishes, in pairs ss explain to their partner what the things they have drawn represent. They then try to reconstruct the song from their drawings. (You can also do this activity with a poem). Good song: Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong.

Word Ring – elem +
Give the ss 8 – 10 key words from a song you know. Write them in random order in a ring on the board and ask them to copy them down. In pairs, ss make up a short story using all the words. Invite ss to tell their stories to the class. Play the song. Ask the ss to tick the words as they hear them, and at the same time put them in order. In pairs, they try to remember the lines in which they heard the words. Challenge ss to reconstruct the whole song! Play the song again. Good song: Norwegian Wood, The Beatles. Words: girl, room, anywhere, chair, wine, morning, wood, laugh, bird, fire. Not necessary to have the lyrics.

Song Opposites – elem +
Before class study the lyrics to a song. Choose some key words and think of approximate antonyms /opposites for these words. Write them in a vertical list on the board. Arrange the class in teams, either pairs or small groups. Each team writes on antonym for every word in the list on the board. Tell them they will hear st on the cassette. They get one point every time their word is mentioned, including all repetitions. Count up the points to see who the winner is. Elicit which words appeared in the song, pairing them with your list of opposites on the board. Elicit as much of the song as you can. Good song: Yesterday, by the Beatles. Antonyms: tomorrow, near, there, gradually, woman, light, come, right, short, hate, work, show. Not necessary to have the lyrics. Or We Are Family, by Sister Sledge.

Group Song Writing – Pre Int +
Ss in groups of 5- 6. They have to complete the stem sentence which the teacher will read out, writing the full sentence on top of a piece of paper, and then passing the paper to the left. Teacher dictates 6 stems. By the time they have completed 6 such sentences, each member will have a list of 6 different sentences on different themes which together form a poem.
Stems: The sun is like; The evening is like.. ; Love is like.. ; a baby is like..; Friendship is like.. ; the morning is like.. .
Ss study the “poems” of each member of the group and attempt to arrange the “best” sentences in some sort of poetic order and to edit them as a song –poem. Ss then put the poems to music!!

Fun Activities to Develop Autonomy

How autonomous are your students?

Are they independent in class and outside? Many of you will say no, they need helping developing autonomous strategies. Well, here I´ve complied a few ideas for ways of developing learner independence - but in fun ways! Enjoy!


Error Awareness

The words we hate
Ask students to go through their notebooks and write down 5- 10 words they have misspelt recently. Check the correct spelling in dictionary. Divide class into groups and give out large sheets of paper and marker pens. Ask one member to write “Our Hate List” at the top of the paper. Cover the sheet randomly with the words. They can write big and use fun lettering. Display posters on wall. Tell students that, in future lessons, when they feel confident with a word, they can cross it off.

Playing Games
Collect 9 sentences with errors from students´ work and make a multichoice exercise. Eg. I keep fit by: joking/jogging. Draw a 3 x 3 grid on the board and divides the class into X/O. Now play noughts and crosses. The winner gets three in a row.

My Favourite Errors
Tell students about your favourite mistakes in English when you were learning. Write your favourite on the board. Ask students to give around 6 favourite mistakes in grammar, vocab, etc. Group pupils in sixes to share. Any interesting ones they write on the board.

My Top Ten
Aim: to encourage the habit of checking for mistakes
This activity is best done when students have built up a fairly large file of corrected work.
· Tell the class that there are likely to be certain errors they make again and again, and that eliminating these can considerably improve the standard of their work.
· At home, students go through their work and make up a “league table” of their 10 most common errors
· In the next lesson, pairs compare their lists and report back to the class. You can note the findings for remedial / revision work
· Tell the students to keep their list handy whenever they are doing a writing task, checking their work for each of those mistakes when they have finished
· Repeat a few months later. Students (and you) can compare lists then and now.

Teaching and learning through social networks

Have you considered using Social Networks with your students? Are you a bit worried about the value of these? Have you heard of teaching and learning English with Second Life?

Have a read of this interesting article - click on Teaching and Learning through Social Networks - and see how you can work with Web 2.0 in class and outside.

Teaching and learning through social networks

The 70 Most Beautiful Words in English: The Answers!

Well, did you guess correctly? Here are the answers to our quiz the 70 Most Beautiful Words in English, as published by the British Council as part of its 70th Anniversary celebration.


And the most beautiful word voted for is:

MOTHER

500 Places to See ....Before They Die

There is a real LISTMANIA these days in Britain - it seems that every time I read the Guardian online there is a new list - best beach hideaways, best restaurants, best hotels.. the list is endless! But how can we use these lists in our teaching? Well, I recently came across a very nice article from the Guardian called 500 Places to See ..Before They Die on http://www.onestopenglish.com/ . This article is about a new guidebook for travellers focusing on sites which are most at risk from climate change and man - made interference.



The article comes in Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced versions and in addition to developing students´ reading skills, also encourages pupils to discuss the positive and negative implications of even more tourists visiting these destinations having read about them in the guide. We conclude this part by asking students to comment on the statement:

"The planet is poorer every time we allow something beautiful to die".

Here are the Intermediate and Advanced versions:

Intermediate

Advanced

After this disussion, I took my upper intermediate students to the computer room where I had them find the website for the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die, which is the original book written to introduce travellers to marvellous tourist destinations worldwide, and which has incidentally sold extremely well!

Students were divided into groups and then within the groups, they had to individually choose a continent each and then select the most beautiful, amazing, natural place from the options available to make a presentation to the groups.

A very nice activity which worked very well.

Webquest of the month

Have you ever tried using a webquest with your students? Maybe you´re not sure what they are..if this is the case, have a look at the article in our October blog on Halloween. There you´ll find a nice webquest example and some ideas on how to use webquests.

This month I´m publishing a webquest which I found recently (sorry, I haven´t got the reference ..if anyone would like to let me know the author?) and which fits in nicely with work at an Intermediate or Upper Intermediate level on travel or American culture: Route 66. This is the famous highway immortalized in song and verse...which actually no longer exists as such, but lives in in the Nation´s consciousness! Try it- something a little different.

Route 66

Story in a bag

Here is a really creative and imaginative activity with almost no preparation - all you need are a few items in a bag to make your class create an oral story. Try it- it really works!

Story in a bag