How to make worksheets in a flash!

As we all know the best way of  improving our or our learners’ vocabulary is through fun activities. And if these activities required less than 5 minutes preparation even better.  So here I will introduce you to “a dream come true”:  Vocabulary Worksheet Factory. Many thanks to my friend Ceci who told me about it.

Vocabulary Worksheet Factory includes a database with loads of activity templates such as crosswords, anagrams, word soups, and so on and so forth. You can personalise the worksheets and create your own wordlists for each of your classes. Finally, you can print it with just one click. It is an excellent tool and you can get it for free in www.englishtips.org or download it from this rapidshare link. Hope you find it useful!

My First Online Exercise

You might be surprised at this! A great lover of the net has never prepared an online exercise. Well, it is said that there is a first time for everything and here’s my first experience!

Before sharing with you my first creation, I would like to introduce you to the webpage where I have placed my exercise. ESL printables is a great website created by Víctor Gayol an English language teacher in Spain. In his website English language teachers exchange resources: worksheets, lesson plans,  activities, etc. Their collection is growing every day with the help of many teachers. If you want to download you have to send your own contributions. I have found wonderful material there, and of course I have made my own contributions too. I strongly recommend it.

And here goes MY online exercise. The episode of  “Shaun the sheep” called “Still Life” is a great video to use with kids. It is mute, but they can practise farm animals, colours, numbers, parts of the day, sad, happy, angry. Hope you like it. Have a look at it and please leave your comments. All your opinions are  welcomed!

Let’s Celebrate Bono’s Birthday in the Classroom!

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

PDF File: You_can\’t_make_it_on_your_own

How to Make Flashcards in a Flash

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.

Here’s a quick way of learning new vocabulary!

This is not really a totally original post, because I’ve heard about this wonderful tool from Silal but I thought it was worth sharing it with all of you. Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary is a great tool for teachers, students, writers and, in fact, for everybody. You can look up a word, and apart from getting a definition as in ordinary dictionaries, a word map will start being created with associations with other words and concepts. Here you can see an example:

In the webpage you can enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections. A great and useful tool. How can we use it in our classes? Leave us a comment.