Ideas for exploiting the Oscars

Lots of good ideas landed in my mail box this morning in the developingteachers.com Weekly Teaching Tip, on how to use the Oscars in class.

Among them, I enjoyed (and think my learners will enjoy) the stories about the Oscars in an article in the Independent.

Halloween videos and lessons

Halloween lessons and lots more on TEFLClips.com

Among the YouTube videos and lessons on Jamie Keddie's award-winning teflclips.com blog you've got a Halloween Horror Story that's fun (and topical!).

If you prefer a more student-centred approach to listening, you could alternatively, and as a lead-in, get your learners to brain-storm the vocabulary they think will come up in a "Halloween Horror Story" and then listen and watch to see how many they got "right".

There are in fact two YouTube videos there. I prefer the second because it's so much shorter (one minute, not five).

Jamie also has a book, Images (OUP 2009), with activities that can be used for teaching of productive and receptive language skills, grammar, vocabulary and so on.

Previous Halloween posts:

• Witches and more stuff for Halloween lessons
  
• Halloween lessons
  
• Halloween project

You've got more Halloween links on the excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk and on the British Council's LearnEnglishKids site.

Valentine's Day lesson plan

Harry met Sally on the Internet...

Here's an idea for a creative, collaborative writing activity for Valentine's Day, which is coming up shortly, which uses a process writing approach...

• Whole class, discuss what good love stories have in common and what they boil down to, preferably a single sentence... The conclusion we reached in the group I first tried this with was that all love stories are variations on "Harry met Sally".
• Individually, have learners expand on that single sentence, not necessarily to finish the story but to make it more romantic.
• In pairs, have the learners pick which of their two stories they like best and, together, expand the one they chose into a first draft of the story
• Whole class, share the stories... This could be done on the computer screens, if you are using computers, or by printing them out, or by posting them on a blog
• In pairs, have the learners give other pairs feedback (orally or in writing...) on their story (what they like/dislike, would add/take away...)
• Edit the story into a second draft, with possibly a second round of feedback...
• Publish the final versions (classroom walls, class blog...)

Process writing and word processing: they were just made for each other, and such activities are lots of fun to do in class, especially when the results are shared and (because the stories are written in pairs) there's no pressure on each individual to prove him/herself a brilliant writer.

Not many students say they enjoy writing, but most say they like doing things in pairs...

More ideas for Valentine's Day:

>> From Larry Ferlazzo
>> Be my Valentine!

A Christmas lesson

Christmas...? You know what I think... (and see below!)

Here's my all-time favourite Christmas lesson*... I've used it with lots of classes, and it's always been fun, both with teenagers and adults.

Stages

1. Play word association in order to brainstorm Christmas vocabulary
   
2. In pairs, find out if their partner believes in Father Christmas; and if not, find out exactly when they stopped believing
   
3. Teacher reads out this letter from an 8-year-old, asking the New York Times editor whether or not Santa exists
   
4. In pairs, write a reply to the letter, from the editor, to be published in the paper
   
5. Pin replies up and get everyone to read everyone else's
   
6. In pairs/3s decide which are the best three replies
   
7. Read the original reply
   
8. Decide whether or not their replies are better than the original (and if so, why/why not).

Alternatives
At Stage (5), you could have pairs swop their letter with another pair, with each pair then having to decide whether or not, as an 8-year-old, they would be satisfied with the answer they got.

If you have a class blog, that would be an ideal place to publish the letters, comment on them etc.

Other Christmas lessons
You could have a webquest to discover how people in other countries celebrate Christmas. Here's a peculiar local custom in Barcelona, for example (photo, above), which you can send as a Christmas card, if you wish.

On Nik Peachey's excellent Daily English Activities blog, you've got an activity your young learners might like -- actually chatting to Santa (so he must exist .-)!

And here are more Christmas lessons, from last year.

*I think I invented the lesson plan myself, but I'd be happy to correct that if my memory (at least ten years later) fails me...

VideoJug: a cool alternative to YouTube

Halloween? Kissing? Halo 3 Tips...? The "How to" video is on VideoJug

My colleague Carolyn Edwards has just told me about VideoJug.com. It's not quite YouTube but has stacks of "How to" videos on it.

As a lesson, you could probably get a lot of mileage out of asking your learners before watching "How to" go about a particular task; get them to make notes of the stages involved; then watch and, while watching, get them to tick in their notes which are mentioned in the video -- giving you student-generated, ready-made, photocopy-free listening comprehension questions.

As a follow-up, assuming you have access to a video camera (or video-equipped mobile phones), get them in groups to (first) storyboard a video of their own and (then) film it.

Your films could then be uploaded on to VideoJug or YouTube, and/or embedded on a class blog.

Not so sure the Love&Sex section is somewhere you want to take your (young) learners (like "Creative Kissing" or the hilarious Avoid Trapped Arm Whilst Cuddling In Bed) but with adults there lots of fun stuff there, and in the site's other sections.

Oh, and don't miss the Halloween videos...

Witches and more stuff for Halloween lessons

WhaaaaaaaaaahHHHHHH! Photo: KateT

It's getting round to that time of year again... On the British Council's Learn English Kids site, you have things about witches and wizards -- "things" being songs and jigsaw puzzles and stories and and stuff you can print, a link which I picked up from the Council's excellent ELTeCS list.

Don't print it, make it!
Stuff you can print...? I've always had my doubts about that -- especially if we are talking about young learners. Who was the teacher trainer I once heard say that it broke her heart "to see young learners all with the same photocopied picture"?

You want ideas, not printable activities, I would suggest -- and for pictures, you want to get your young learners to draw them. If you've got a class blog, that's where they should be published.

If we're talking teenagers, for whom drawing witches is undoubtedly not going to be cool, you could get them to take photos of Halloweeny things on their mobile phones -- which again could be great on a class blog.

Don't worry so much about the quality of the images -- just quick snapshots like the one at the top of this post (detail of the decorations at Reception here at school) will produce a great collection.

Creating, not consuming
If you then got your learners to write ghost stories (possibly featuring the creatures they've taken photos, or drawn pictures of), then they'd be creating, not merely consuming -- and that's what technology allows us to do.

In Spanish, here's another idea that makes a great Halloween activity.

Related posts

>> A Halloween project
>> Halloween lessons

October 12: Columbus Day

This coming Sunday is Columbus Day, or El Día de la Hispanidad -- which might make an interesting webquest (not something your students will thank you for, if you make them do it Sunday ,-)!

You'll find ideas for other "Days of the Year" here; and on TeachingEnglish.org.uk there are some neat ideas for how you could exploit the days of the week, etc, with kids, just about any day of the year.

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 project

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.