A cloudy day

This is an easy activity to get learners speaking and practising question words. Give learners a piece of paper and tell them to draw eight clouds, with a topic in each. Then they write one question in each cloud, after which they interview a partner. After the interview, learners swap papers with their partner and add another question to each cloud. Then they interview a different partner, swap, add another question, and so on… It keeps learners motivated as they talk to different people and the questions vary a little each time. Also, they have to think of more questions about each topic and classmates may have chosen different topics.

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October 10

Last to leave

It may be early days, but so far this term this is proving to be an effective classroom management technique to limit Spanish in the class.

It’s a simple “button” which I stick next to a student’s name when they speak Spanish. When another student speaks Spanish, the button moves. Whoever has the button at the end of the class stays behind to help tidy up…wiping off the board, putting the tables and chairs straight, etc.

It’s handy as well as they police each other!

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March 23

Shark Attack!

This is a fabulous activity for older Primary students, teens and adults which I picked up from Katherine Bilsborough’s session at the recent TESOL-SPAIN convention.

Firstly, ask students to draw the picture below – you could do this as a picture dictation, or project the picture and ask them to copy it. You can see me in the picture too (I’m eating an ice cream!).

Students also draw themselves in the picture and then do a mingle activity to add more detail to their picture. For lower levels, this could be, “What are you doing?” or for higher levels, “What were you doing when the shark attacked?” Students draw their classmates onto the picture and can then compare drawings, write a news report or report back to the class in whole group feedback.

This is a highly adaptable activity as by changing the original picture, you could use it for a variety of different topics and grammar points, e.g…

Students draw the playground and pictures of what they can do (What can you do? I can play tennis.)
Students draw a house and after the mingle activity, the teacher could say that someone was murdered in the living room, leading to modals of speculation (It can’t have been Tom – he was playing football in the garden.)
Students could draw an object in a classroom to practise prepositions (The ruler is under the chair.)
And many more…

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March 3

One-Board Games

This term is great for professional development, with something happening every month. In January, there was the TEFL del Sur Swap Shop, last month was FECEI‘s annual event in Madrid and now I’m getting ready for TESOL-SPAIN‘s annual conference, which this year is being held in Sevilla.

My theme for this workshop is one-board games, as I’m a huge fan of reusing materials and adapting basic things to suit as many different ages, levels and activities as possible. So my talk demonstrates 10 activities you can do using this board with any age or level – from VYLs to FCE students (and beyond). Find out more about the activities here and download some of the sample activities from the Activities for your Classroom page.

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February 25

Classroom Management Ideas

My diary gets filled up with bits of paper – notes from meetings, from development sessions, random scraps with names and telephone numbers on, and so on! In a bid to tidy up my diary a little, I’m going to type up some notes from an input session we had at work…one less piece of paper to carry around.

It was a session on dealing with large classes, but a lot of the ideas which came out would work with any class. Here are a few…

Engage the whole class at the start of the lesson, with a drill or something similar. My colleague Ceri Jones has a great activity in which she divides the class into two teams, A and B. She says a question and then says either A or B. If she says A, team A repeat the question and B answer. It encourages everyone to listen as they need to know what the question was and which team is going to ask it.
Think about how you can address the group rather than the individual – if you have a class of fifteen students and want to spend a minute with each one, what are your other students doing for the fourteen minutes when your attention isn’t focussed on them?
Do you have an effective points sytem? Is it based on the individual, a team or the whole class?
What role do fast-finishers have? We often use those quick students as helpers and correctors, but do they know how to do this effectively?
Think about the level of noise in the classroom. Michael Linsin suggests a scale so everyone knows what’s expected of them at any one time.
Finally, think about the things you do on a daily basis and whether they could be done more effectively. For example, writing the students’ names on the board takes time at the start of every lesson – could you have them pre-prepared on paper, or ask a student to do it?