Professor Harry Waters shared a creative, fun idea to incorporate songs into our conversation classes in a recent episode of the More Than English Podcast. It's called Songversation! How It Works:
Pro Tips:Adapt the lesson for your style and your classes. Try different ways of doing it and allow students freedom to try different things. Pre-approve songs before they start their projects (if you do projects with it). Demonstrate what you want the students to do first. Easter Egg Lessons:Expand Musical Palate - Introduce your students to different kinds of music. Building creativity - They will get to exercise their creativity with forming their questions and answers. What else can you find?
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With this worksheet...You or your students will have guided practice for their reading even on their own! They will:
This will give students direction and motivation to read more in English with some guidance. Use this as a part of your private lessons or classes to give the students extra value! This is FREE for a limited time, so get yours today! WorksheetName: ________________________ Date: _______________ I’m reading _________________________________ Pre-Reading: Know what you're reading.
Reading: Know what you're learning.CONTENT
b. _____________________________________________________________ c. _____________________________________________________________ LANGUAGE
Post-Listening: Know what you've read.
When we learn a language, we can listen to anything we want and make a lesson out of it. Sometimes our students really want to learn English and ask us for extra work to practice everyday. This can be difficult sometimes because it takes time to think of an activity, and we have our own lives with our own time-consuming problems. Well, fortunately, we have prepared a worksheet for you to give to your students that will apply to any English listening audio or video they want to listen to. The idea of this exercise is to practice listening for content as well as learning and applying English expressions both old and new. The beauty of this type of exercise is they can listen to anything they want! Here's how it works...
WorksheetName: ________________________ Date: _______________ I’m listening to _________________________________ Length of audio: ______ Pre-Listening: Know what you're listening to.
Listening: Know what you’re listening for.CONTENT
b. _____________________________________________________________ LANGUAGE
Post-Listening: Know what you've listened to.
Worksheets are FREE for a limited time. Get yours today! Pro Tips: Consider the Level - You could try this for any level student that asks for it, but it will probably be most beneficial to at least a Blue Belt (Intermediate) student who has a good handle on basic grammar and expressions. Consider Your Time - You don't need to spend that much time reviewing unless you want to assign it as proper homework and use it in your lessons. Easter Egg Lessons:Any Language - As the teacher, you could do these activities in any foreign language you're trying to learn. Think Twice - It could cause some of us to really think about the things we watch and why we watch them, which could ultimately save us time if we eliminate the more useless things. What else can you find?
If you've never actually played Stop The Bus in your PRE-TEEN and TEEN classes, you're doing yourself a disservice. This can also be a lot of fun for INTERMEDIATE ADULT classes. Your students will have to think quick because they're racing against each other to think of spontaneous English words. It might be a good idea to remind them to remember and use their vocabulary section of their notebooks. Any rules or parameters you give to include things you've learned in your classes would make this game even more productive. Lesson Plan
food | jobs | animals | phrasal verbs | adjectives | transportation· Choose a letter for the class to use · Students write a word in each column that begins with that letter. · The first person who finishes yells, "Stop the bus!" and everyone has to stop writing. · 5 points for shared answers; 10 points for unique answers Pro-Tips:· I like to add some "English" categories like phrasal verbs or adjectives. · This works for classes and 1-on-1 students. · In 1-on-1 lessons, the student goes against you. (Don't be surprised if you student does better than you!) Easter Egg Lessons:Thinking Under Pressure - If you ever play this game with co-workers or students, you'll know what kind of pressure this game offers. You'll find it's difficult to think of a profession that begins with P when you're in the game. Our students are practicing the skill of thinking under pressure. Losing - The truth is, most of your students will lose this game. It's an important skill to know how to lose, and to know that it's not the end of the world. Some of your classes will get very competitive. Losing is an important skill to learn in order to know how to win. More Words - Many of the students will lose because they missed some of the obvious words that they didn't know that they know. They will end up learning words that they don't even realize that they're learning them... but you'll be able to observe this. What else can you think of?
Teachers and Students Are A Lot AlikeJust like our students, if we're not stimulated or motivated by our jobs, we will become bored and ineffective. This will create a chain reaction because if we're ineffective as teachers, our chances of having quality classes for the students drastically goes down. Our students can sense this, and they will not be motivated and turn off, or worse, distract others. We all know what an unravelled class looks like. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to keep yourself motivated while you're either honing your craft as an EFL teacher or looking for what you really want to do. Lessons, Materials, Worksheets, Stories, Etc.Finding the Challenge1. Find the Challenge - Focus on the people instead of the subject matter. This will always be dynamic and constantly changing because people are all different in their learning styles, classroom conduct, and how they receive information. Remember, you're not teaching English, you're teaching people... English. Creating goals for both yourself and your students can make your job more stimulating because you have inherent challenges to accomplish with each goal. Goals for yourself could be personal growth or professional goals, and also creating goals for the students will give you something in common to work towards. 2. Avoid the Lesson Plan Crutch - Don't stick too strictly to a lesson plan. We need to be flexible and spontaneous in our classes, and lesson plans can kill this if we try to follow it too rigidly. As we become more experienced, we can start to use bullet points as our lesson plans and focus more on helping students directly in each class. Of course, this comes with experience. Go with questions that students ask. 3. Find the Challenge Within Yourself - As mentioned above, one of the goals you could add for yourself in your time in the classroom is a personal growth goal. Personal growth goals are fantastic because our classrooms are a hotbed for working on organization, creativity, and above all, PATIENCE. If you're working with teens or kids, this is a great character trait to practice working on. Overall, if teaching your subject matter isn't stimulating, find something else that is stimulating, and work on that during your lessons to help you become a better teacher, parent, friend, partner, or simply a better person in general. There's always somewhere to go! Do you have any other ideas?
Download this fun and engaging PowerPoint template to play a HOT POTATO style game to review any vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, homework, or expressions that your students have recently learned. Adapt the slides for your particular needs in your classes. The presentation has upbeat music that hold the students' interest. Lesson Plan
What's the Game?If you're familiar with HOT POTATO, you can play this. You can look below at the types of slides that are on the template. All slides that have the rubber band ball are accompanied with fun game show-type music during the pass the ball time. The template can be adjusted to teach any lesson you want to teach. All you have to do is change out the photo slides for other photos or text. What the slides look like...Pro TipsSet time limits and sentence requirements for the game. (Ex. Student must speak for 15 seconds about the photo OR Student must say at least 3 sentences about the photo) The students might get too excited and start using their native language. Encourage English communication with a point or elimination system. Change the slides for fill-in-the blank questions or other exam review style content. Easter Egg Lessons:On-the-spot Thinking - Students will have to think instantly about the language they want to use Creativity - You can add extra points for more creative answers What else can you find?
Comprehension Questions1. What are the 10 things speaker Mary Roach lists? (Try to catch at least 5) 2. What is "The Upsuck Theory"? 3. In the 1950s, what did the scientists Masters and Johnson try to find out? 4. Why did pig farmers start to become more 'active' when inseminating pigs? True/False1. Fetuses have been observed masturbating in the womb. 2. The woman who had an orgasm brushing her teeth had brilliantly white teeth. 3. Orgasms only come from genital stimulation. 4. Completely dead people can have orgasms. 5. Orgasms can stop hiccups. 6. In the 1950s, Masters and Johnson found validity in the Upsuck Theory. 7. Sperm that stays in the body for more than a week makes them stronger. 8. People are the only species that experience pleasure during orgasm. 9. Men's semen can be shot at up to 8 feet (2.5 meters). Easter Egg Lessons- Learn something new about orgasms - Enjoy a new topic they probably haven't studied with before What else can you find?
This is a fun way to review homework or to give motivation to the students to do book exercises during class. I recommend this for smaller classes.
Tips:· Allow a student to draw the X and O if they want (the more participation the better!) · Most students choose middle first. Teach them that the corners are the best strategy · Set a time (10 seconds) for them to choose their squares and numbers Easter Egg Lesson:Direction Vocabulary - Teach top/ bottom/ left/ right/ middle and watch them use these terms better and better over time. Real Interaction - If you choose students to write the X and O on the board, they can do the entire interaction. - "What square do you want?" - "Bottom middle" - "Team B, choose a number" Tic-Tac-Toe Strategy - This teaches more than just winning at tic-tac-toe. Once you teach that the middle isn't the best first move, they will usually get it and learn to think a bit differently. Teamwork - They will learn to work in a team in choosing the right square together and choosing which number they want the other team to answer. Want more?Good luck! Let me know how it worksfor you and if you have any special touches that I can try in my classes:
Having good conversation skills is an important skill to have no matter what language we're speaking. Parts of a good conversation are:
This is a nice, short activity that we can fit in anywhere in a lesson, and we recommend doing it often enough that our students can build a good routine of asking follow-up questions and practice real conversation. Use this to turn the English mode on in their brains. Lesson Plan
Student: I woke up at 7:00... Teacher: How did you wake up? Student: Um, my phone alarm. Teacher: Ok. Continue. Student: Then I had breakfast. Teacher: What did you eat? Etc. · Students do this with a partner. · Share a few examples as a class to correct. Pro Tips:Create a point system that you see fit. (Ex. a point for each follow-up question) Good luck! Let me know how it worksfor you and if you have any special touches that I can try in my classes: Easter Egg LessonIf we do this on a regular or semi-regular basis, the students will grow their interactive conversation skills that they can use in English or their own language. Being a good conversationalist can be difficult, but it's fundamental in making new friends and influencing people.
One of the best tools you can have in your bag or teacher box is a dice. There are many things you can do with dice as a teacher: play a board game, choose who goes first in a game, or you could open your classes with vocabulary review games. Opening Routine
Break the class into teams. Choose team names (Adjective + Noun) Assign the numbers of the dice to do tasks based on their roll (EVEN or ODD if you just do two tasks) Draw (draw a picture of the chosen word) Act (act out the chosen word) -for more advanced levels- Describe (describe the chosen word without saying any part of the word) Take turns to come up, roll the dice, and do the task based on the number. Easter Egg LessonsAdjective + Noun - For many languages around the world, our form of ADJECTIVE + NOUN to describe something is backwards to their language. Therefore, it can take some work to change the order in English. Doing this in the beginning of each class is an engaging way to reinforce their correct order in English. Added Vocabulary - After the students get accustomed to making team names, they will go through several stages, especially for teens. If you remind them that their is a language purpose of doing this, students usually respect that and start caring a bit more. Even and Odd Numbers - Doing this as an opening routine for a while will allow you to teach EVEN numbers and ODD numbers. Chances are your students will know what they are, so you can just focus on the best way to help them remember it in English. Want more?
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