Today is Bono’s birthday, so let’s take this opportunity to bring a bit of music into the classroom. I have prepared some activities for the song Bono has dedicated to his father: “Sometimes you can’t Make it on your Own”. You will find activities for teaching vocabulary, listening comprehension and grammar (don’t have to vs. mustn’t). Download the file, play the video from You Tube and that’s it.
A great fun lesson to enjoy with your students. Don’t forget to tell us how it works and if you have any other idea : SHARE IT WITH US
If you are a Twitter addict or fan, you will most probably get surprised once you use this great and fun tool: Twitter Charts. You are asked to enter your Twitter ID (which must be publicly available) and then, the system generates lots of charts providing information about your tweets by month, day of the week and hour. It also specifies who you have been twitting with. A nice toy to play with and realise how much time we spend in front of the computer without realising it.
NOTE: Emapey has written a good post about this in his blog : Online Sapiens
If you are a busy teacher, with no time in your hands… If your old flashcards are getting yellowish and you believe it’s time to renew them, but you are constantly putting it off…If you don’t want to spend too much time preparing them and at the same time you want to give them a high quality look… Here is the solution to all your problems: The Cambridge English Online Flashcard Maker.
It allows you to prepare flashcards using drawings from an image library, making your own drawings or just by inserting text. It also has a great feature: You can include the phonetic transcript of the word!
I’m sure there are other great tools out there in the web 2.0 world for creating flashcards: are you using any? What are the advantages and disadvantages of these tools? Can you share them with us? Looking forward to your comments.
The 3rd May is “World Press Freedom Day” so why not take the opportunity to discuss this important issue with our students? A great film we can use to bring about this topic is “All the president’s men”. Here you will see the trailer of the movie.
You may decide to watch the whole film with your students or concentrate on the scene in which Carl Berstein confronts the public relations executive and secures information about Mr. Dahlberg (at about one hour into the film). Before watching the film, you can discuss the meaning of free press and explain to them that they are going to watch a scene from a film about the of role the press. Students will need to have information about the Watergate case. If you find it necessary, provide them with some background information (e.g from Wikipedia)
Divide them into 4 groups and ask each group to view the film from one of the following perspectives: the investigative reporters, the editors, the people being investigated, and US Citizens. They should collect information for a debate about:
1) The techniques used by investigative reporters. What type of questions do they ask? What ethical standards do they follow?
2) What risks are involved in running a controversial story such as this? What ethical standards do editors follow?
3) How people being investigated respond to the press? How are they feeling? Are they honest?
After watching the film, give them some time in groups to organise their ideas for the debate. Then, make a whole class debate. To sum up the discussion, you might pose the following questions: What values seem to conflict with freedom of press? What can we do to ensure free press? What limits, if any, do you think we as a society should place on the press?
If you don’t have acces to a VCR or DVD player and you still want to deal with this topic, there are several lesson plans on the net. The ones I liked the most are the following two:
1) An article on press censorship in the bbc learning englich central website.
2) An article or listening activity at Breaking News English ESL Lesson Plans.
Hope you find it useful. If you have any other idea, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.
Have you ever wondered how much “nature” your lifestyle requires? Why not take this opportunity (Earth Day, which is on 22nd March) to reflect upon what we are doing to our planet? You can start the class with a short warm up activity. This Ecological Footprint Quiz estimates how much productive land and water you need to support what you use and what you discard. Beware, you may be surprise at the results!
A good film that fits perfectly with this topic is Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. Here you will find a list of questions that you can use to discuss with your students after watching the movie. You can finish the class by watching this video, which I have found in video jug, in order to promote some action. What can they do to help solving this problem?
Finally, if you want to revise making predictions (using goign to and will) you can find out whether they are pessimistic or optimistic about the future of our planet. Ask them to make some predictions. They can talk about the climate, the anvironment, energy, health, transport, agriculture and many others.
Hope you find it useful and don’t forget to share your ideas or experience with us.
Are you bored of dicussing current news with your students always in the same way? Finding a piece of news in a newspaper, True or False, questions, vocabulary work and personal reactions to the text seem to be the only way available. However, there is more to it than just that. Having a look at Larry Ferlazzo’s blog I have found another online jewel for teaching English. It is a game called Play the News, with which you will be able to have some fun with your students while working on the well-known “current affairs topic”.
Play the News is an interactive game based on current news. You are given some background information and you can watch some videos in order to get informed for the game. Then, you are asked to choose a role to voice your opinion on the subject. Finally, you are given the possibility of predicting what is going to happen in the real world. To be able to play you have to register for free.
I believe it will become a great tool in most of my Business Classes and in some General English classes too. What do you think about it? What are the possibilities that this game has to offer? As always, please if you use it, share your experience with us.
The 42nd international IATEFL conference is about to start. If just like me, you haven’t got the opportunity of travelling to Exeter, don’t worry, you can get all the information about it by visiting the official website. There you will find lots of resources so that you can get information about what’s going on at the conference and at the same time, be able to participate and share ideas with colleagues. Among other things you will find:
video and audio recordings of selected sessions
live streamed plenaries and events
moderated discussion forums
chat sessions, interviews, reports, photo albums and a lot more!
I am currently moderating the Business English Forum so I’m really looking forward to seeing you all there.
Talking about films, I would like to share with you a wonderful resource I have just found surfing the net: TEFL Clips. It is an excellent and very useful blog in which you will find a lesson plan per week based on a You Tube video. I believe that You Tube has opened up tons of possibilities for TEFL. We are able to expose our students to real English with material that is fun and attractive. So why not cut down on the amount of time we spend planning and use the lesson plans available here? Share with us your opinion about the site and what you do with You Tube videos in your classes.
I’m sure that you are always trying to include in your classes material which is real, up-to-date and that your students find great fun. Of course, it is a very difficult combination to achieve, but it’s worth taking the trouble, because the results are optimum: your students get really engaged with the class and they learn up-to-date English.
One of the most useful resources that we can bring into the class are films. However, we sometimes avoid working with films as it is extremely time-consuming to prepare a lesson based on them. Of course, we can resort to the old way: bring a film, give the students a few questions to answer after watching the whole of it, press play and forget about them for at least one hour and a half. We all perfectly know that that this is useless. They don’t learn a thing and most probably they answer the questions because they have already seen the film in their mother tongue.
If you want to work deeply with films in your classes and don’t want to spend too much time planning, I have found some solutions surfing the net. First of all, there is a page called Challenge-Education , in which you will find lots of lesson plans based on scenes from different films for all levels. There are some sample lessons you can download for trying purposes. I have used them and they are very effective and engaging.
If you would like to use a whole movie rather than just scenes, you should have a look at English Behind the Scenes . Here, apart from finding lesson plans for the entire movie, you will find tips on how to create activities to use with movies yourself. There are also some sample lesson plans you can download.
And now, what do you do with films in your classes? Share with us any other idea, resource or just your opinion on the topic. Looking forward to reading you.
As the 21st of March is the international day for the elimination of racial discrimination I have prepared this short lesson plan to discuss the topic with my students. The lesson is based around the poem: “White Comedy” by Benjamin Zephaniah. He is one of my favourite poets. If you don’t know him, here are the words he uses in his official website to introduce himself:
“My full name is Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah which is Christian, Jewish and Muslim. I was born in the district of Handsworth in Birmingham. My poetry is strongly influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica and I can’t remember a time when I was not creating poetry. This had nothing to do with school where poetry meant very little to me, infact I had finished full time education at the age of 13.”
“I try to write poems that are fun but they should also have a serious message.”
In the class first I ask my students to read the poem “White Comedy” and to tell me what is strange about it (the fact that the authour has changed the word black for white in some lexical items) and then we discuss whether he has done that solely for the sake of humour or not. Here’s the poem (You can download a file of Zephaniah reciting the poet in the British Council page. He’s great, it’s worth listening to him) :
White Comedy
from “Propa Propaganda”
I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death.
People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined de white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don’t worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.
After that, we discuss the meaning of the words if we turn them into their black counterparts. I usually ask them to match the words with definitions, but if you have advanced courses they may already know the meanings and they can provide the definitions. Gabriella Sellart has done a great job preparing a glossary for this poem in her blog “Glossaries”. You can also make your students pay attention to the meanings of the words white magic and white lies and what is the implication of referring to the White House as the Black House.
I would round off the class by asking the following questions for debate:
What do you think the poem says about the connotatins embedded in Western Language and Cultures?
Have you ever stopped to think about that?
Hope you find this lesson plan useful and remember if you use it or modify it share your experience with us. Finally, if you have any other ideas to do on this particular day let us know, it’s great to learn from each other.
sabridv
