Happy New Year!

With very best regards from me, FabTeacher - may your 2010 be all you want it to be!

Check out this BBC New Year´s greeting in no fewer than 32 various languages. Can you identify them all?!

Christmas Webquest

Ho, ho, ho! Yes, it´s almost Christmas and I know many of you will be looking for something a little different for your last class before Christmas.

I hope you enjoy this webquest for Upper Intermediate students I found recently- the students research Christmas traditions and write up their findings as a class magazine.



Christmas Webquest

Fun Vocabulary Activities

It´s always a real problem getting students to remember and then recall vocabulary, isn´t it? What is the trick? Well, your activities need to be memorable! Here are a couple of fun activities which work on clothes vocabulary and will appeal to your kinesthetic, visual and linguistic students.

1. Statues
Recap clothes vocabulary. Ask ss to stand up and move round the room. When you give a signal, they stand back to back with a partner. Then they try to remember what the other student is wearing.

2. You Have Changed
Divide ss into groups of 4- 6. Each group is to study the other groups. Ask them all to turn away and make some changes to their appearance, eg. exchanging pullovers, changing a watch from one wrist to another, removing rings, etc. They present themselves to the other group who has to point out as many changes as possible.

3. Spelling Game
Divide the class into teams. Each team takes it in turns to add a letter to a word and each letter must contribute to a word in English related (in this case) to clothing, BUT the team which completes the word loses and the opposing team is awarded a point.
Eg. Team A says H. Team B says A. Team A says T.. Therefore team A loses as they have completed the word HAT!

It´s that time again- testing and revision....

Well, as Christmas draws near, it´s also time for most of us to start preparing tests and then, horrors!, marking them! But just how can we get our students involved in the whole testing and revision process? Here are two techniques I find useful as they also help develop our students´ autonomy, making them reflect on their learning more deeply.

1. Question Challenge Based on Textbook
Each student prepares two or three questions based on the last three units or so in their coursebook. Put ss in pairs or small groups in the next lesson to pool their questions. Then they challenge another team to answer the questions. You can direct the quiz by giving categories such as countries, food, school, geography, etc. (Good for cross curricular content and CLIL).


2. Revision Bubbles
A good way of doing student – generated revision of structures and vocab. Draw a bubble on the board and ask for suggestions from students to fill the bubble, eg. words from the previous 3 units. In groups. Students make as many sentences or questions as possible using their words. 10 minutes. One point for each correct sentence. Or students can use the words to write a dialogue and act it out

Webquest of the Month!

Here is a lovely webquest about Ireland which fits in with any unit on the Emerald Isle..and makes it all much more fun! Enjoy!

http://sites.google.com/site/annejeanpark/home/blog/Ireland-DiscoveringModernCelticCulture-Process.mht?attredirects=0&d=1

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

Pronunciation Chart - Hear the Sounds!

Help your students hear the sounds of English by clicking on the symbols of the pronunciation chart in the link BELOW - you can now install it on your own PC or Mac computer and use off line or in the classroom. To download the chart, simply click on the link below and then save the file to your desktop. You can then just click on the file to open it at any time. (PS: There is a version for a Mac computer on the Teaching English website below, if you use a Mac).

CLICK HERE

Another great idea from
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/.

Fun Activity: The Soap Opera

Looking for a fun activity to practice adjectives to describe personality and appearance? Or to develop students´ writing in a creative AND FUN way? Try this! It´s one of my favourite activities! It works very well with adult students (EOI, for example) - I recommend selecting a range of pictures for the students so they can relate to the characters and choose the photos they prefer.

The soap opera

If you like this activity, go to: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/ - you will find lots of great ideas for teaching, plus some good articles on aspects of methodology, etc.

Halloween is nearly here!

Halloween is nearly here and what better way to celebrate it than doing a Webquest with your students. For those who don´t know what a webquest is, here is a short definition :

A webquest is an assignment which asks students to use the World Wide Web to learn about and/or synthesize their knowledge on a specific topic. A “true” webquest, as originally designed by Bernie Dodge and Tom March, requires synthesis of the new knowledge by accomplishing a “task,” often to solve a hypothetical problem or address a real-world issue. Simpler web activities designed for students to investigate and collect new knowledge from web-based sources can also be a more engaging and effective replacement for read-the-chapter-and-complete-the-review-questions.

Essentially, webquests are mini projects in which a large percentage of the input and material is supplied by the Internet.

For more information and reasons for doing webquests, and how to structure and produce webquests, read this article below:
Webquest Article

Fancy trying something new with your Bachillerato or teens? Here is a nice webquest a participant on a course I was doing recently sent in .
Go to this link:
Horror Holidays

QUIZ TIME - The 70 Most Beautiful Words in English!

I´m sure you all have your favourite words in English! Maybe you like the meaning of the word, or the sound, or perhaps it makes you laugh.





Well, in 2004, The British Council as part of their 70th Anniversary celebrations, decided to ask people for their favourite 70 words in English.

Can you guess the TOP TEN? Please post your answers in the Comments.

I will reveal the answers on 10 November, so happy word hunting!

250th Anniversary of Robert Burns

Immortal Memory


Did you know 2009 is the 250th Anniversary of the Birth of the great Scottish poet, Robert (Rabbie) Burns? To celebrate this event, there are more than 400 celebrations organized in Scotland throughout 2009. Everyone is welcome to visit! Some of Scotland´s contibutions to the world:


Golf
Whisky
Great inventors
Scientific Innovation
Cultural heritage

Although Burns lived a short life, dying at the age of 37, it was fulfilling and eventful. Starting out as a farmer then moving on to become a writer, Burns travelled throughout Scotland where he gathered inspiration for much of his work. The stunning Ayrshire scenery and the romantic setting of Dumfries helped provide the insight for compiling much of his romantic material.

Around the world tributes to the life and works of Robert Burns are held, through the ritual of the Burns Supper. Originally started a few years after his death by a group of his friends and acquaintances to honour his memory, the suppers are now celebrated annually on the date of his birth, 25th January.

No Burns Supper would be complete without The Haggis, The Drink (normally Whisky), The Songs, The Recitals, The Dance and of course the most important ingredient of all, The Fun. If Burns were alive today he too would surely have enjoyed the celebrations!

2009 marks the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns' birth and is the inspiration behind the year of Homecoming. Come home to the home of Burns in 2009 and celebrate his life and work at one of the many Burns-related events during the year. View the video below for a taster of what it's like to be at a Burns Supper.


If you want to know more about Burns´ life and work - and hear him speak and recite his own poetry, go to this great interactive site which the Scottish government has set up: http://www.scotland.org/burns-night/interactive/

Are Your Students Tense about Tenses?

If so, read this funny example. This is an actual phone call - a student calling her teacher from a railway station........

"Hello, Jill. I´m sorry, I shall be late, er, I mean, I will be late".. Or is it better to say, "I´m going to be late?" Doesn´t "will" suggest volition? And it´s not my fault. I didn´t want to be late - it is the train that is late. (Or should that be "was" late? It should have been here at 08.30 and it is now 08.45). "Oh! I must be quick". (Noise of train in background). "The train has arrived!" - or should that be "is arriving"? It hasn´t stopped yet. Sorry! See you in about an hour´s time".. or should that be "I will see you.." or "I will be seeing you?..

Do you think maybe the teacher has been correcting her students too much?! How much should we correct and when should we ignore mistakes? What do you think?