Valentine's Day

Here's a link to the ideas for Valentine's Day I posted last year. Ideas for classes for other days of the year here.

Christmas lessons

Happy Catalan Christmas!

It must be getting round to that time of year again... Christmas! There are some Christmas lesson plans on DevelopingTeachers.com, if you are looking, and another 2 million plus on Google, it would appear.

A webquest would be one idea, and here's a Christmas webquest from OneStopEnglish.

If you have a class blog, they could post their results there, or they could write about their own Christmas traditions as well as ones they discover in a webquest (in the image, above, a Catalan Christmas tradition).

If you've got young learners, somewhere I would always look for ideas would be EnchantedLearning.com, where there are some results.

A Christmas card is always fun with kids -- you could get them to draw a nativity scene and then label the different things (shepherds, kings, donkeys, the Baby Jesus, etc) so that they learn some English too.

Halloween lessons

On TeachingEnglish.org.uk's section of resources for teaching children, there's a new .pdf file with ideas for Halloween lessons.

>> More ideas for Halloween lessons

October 10, World Mental Health Day

This Wednesday (October 10th) is World Mental Health Day, the "Weekly Teaching Tip" from DevelopingTeachers.com tells me.

If you like your lesson plans gifted to you without too much thought on your part -- and directly into your own mailbox if you subscribe -- the Tip is a good place to look.

Personally, I like students as involved as possible from the start. This week's Tip quotes an article on stress from the BBC. The headings are:

• Symptoms of stress
• Dealing with stress
• Work-related stress
• Tackling work stress

I'd suggest starting there and, before the students read the article, get them to brainstorm what they think will come under the headings... Getting them to find which of the ideas they came up with and what other ideas the article suggests then gives you a natural reason for reading the article, and a natural reading comprehension question.

"Stress", some wit once said, "is when you wake up screaming and then you realise you haven't fallen asleep yet." If you're already stressed out yourself by your new term, now you know where to look...!

>> Bank of previous teaching tips
>> More free stuff in your mailbox

April Fool's Day

The excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk site has a lesson plan for April Fool's Day (April 1st, regrettably, from a teacher's point of view, this year on a Sunday!), plus links, etc.

TeachingEnglish.org.uk is a site you definitely want to bookmark (make one of your "Favourites"): it's got lots of great advice on the basics of English language teaching.

Once you've got a lot more teaching experience, you might want to move on to another excellent British Council, SearchEnglish.

More lesson plans for special days of the year here.

Be my Valentine!

1 paperclip, 2 pieces of paper, 1 small blob blutack... Er, maybe not that cheap...?

Lifehacker (again!), this time pointing me to "how to date on the cheap, without seeming cheap". I bookmarked that one -- well, Valentine's Day is coming up, isn't it?

Valentine's Day is one of those days of the year on which you can have a spot of fun in class, not to mention some writing or speaking practice.

You could, for example, discuss precisely that topic -- how to date when you're skint. Or get them to write a love story... Or discuss what makes a good love story?

Or discuss how to date a hopelessly unromantic person...

A school I know gets some of their youngest kids to make Valentine's cards which they put in random envelopes and give to each other (so everyone gets one!), to provide you with another example.

More ideas here on developingteachers.com.

Christmas lessons

Happy (Lego) Christmas!

Christmas lessons
In my mailbox this morning, from the excellent DevelopingTeachers.com weekly teaching tip, some ideas for Christmas lessons.

How was your term?
I also liked the idea (same source) of "assessing how the different courses that we teach have been going & how to tackle them in the next term", together with some suggestions for questions you might ask yourself.

Playing with Lego
The image shows the crib my son and I created with Lego Men. For a fun class activity, if you just happen to have some small Lego models plus their instructions lying around, take them into class, give one student the instructions, their partner the pile of bricks -- and the partner has to build the model. What you want is the kind of Lego model that comes in a little box, with very few parts (around 25) -- a dumper truck, that sort of thing, or a police motorbike.

Works best if you specify that only the builder can actually touch the bricks.

See also
More lesson ideas for special days of the year.

More stuff in your mailbox.

Halloween

Halloween in IH... and probably celebrated in some way in many language classrooms

I came across this list of 100 scariest movies the other day and thought, "That might make a good blogging project".

A rough outline of a project

• In class, brainstorm, talk about "scariest movies", to see if we can produce a list of, say, 10 to 20
• See if we can agree on a rough ranking for them
• Turn on the PCs, and use a collaborative process writing approach to produce a plot summary plus what makes them really, really scary
• Go through various drafts, getting the other learners to commit on each others' work, and saving as Word documents
  
• Post the final version on a blog
• Get students to read the finished products, and use the "comments" feature to "vote" which they now think are most scary

Time sitting facing the PC screen...? I'd estimate it at under 30% of the total -- as it should be, I would suggest.

More resources
More Halloween lesson plans on the BBC, and on DevelopingTeacher.com.

More lesson plans for other days of the year.

Today is...

Because it's Valentine's Day or Halloween or the anniversary of some historic event -- or because you just want a change from your coursebook -- "Today is..." can sometimes make for a topical lesson, and out there is cyberspace there are some great resources:

1.-- Calendar events
Below, some examples. For other events, you could try searching on either DevelopingTeachers or OneStopEnglish.

• For Valentine's Day, you have lesson ideas and lesson plans, on DevelopingTeachers.com
• For Halloween, there is lots of stuff on the British Council kids site
• For Christmas, there's a webquest (and lots more) on OneStopEnglish
• For New Year, Snopes.com has a section on superstitions

DevelopingTeachers also has a list of days, and resources for them.

2.-- Bizarre calendar events
On bizarrenews.com you can get a list of (bizarre) "today is..."

• February 23 is International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day
• October 9 is Mouldy Cheese Day
• November 19 is "Have A Bad Day Day"
• November 28 is "Make Your Own Head Day

3.-- Holiday (etc) orgins

• Wikipedia has excellent focus on days of the year
• HolidayOrigins.com explains the origins of US holidays
  
• EarthCalendar.net is a "daybook of holidays and celebrations around the world".
  

4.-- Historic events

• The BBC has BBC an "On this day" page...
• The Guardian has a wonderful section of "Historic events as The Guardian saw them", going right back to 1834.