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.

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?

You or your students will have guided practice for their reading even on their own! They will:

• Be guided through comprehension questions
• Note new and old vocabulary and expressions to improve fluency

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!

Name: ________________________                                               Date: _______________
I’m reading _________________________________          

1. What type of reading is it? (novel, news/sports article, biography, etc.)


2. How long did you spend reading?

​

CONTENT

1. Write one sentence answering what this text was about?  


2. Write 1-3 sentences details from the text. (What did you understand?)

            a. _____________________________________________________________
            b. _____________________________________________________________
            c. _____________________________________________________________
 
LANGUAGE

1. Write 1-3 OLD expressions that are familiar. (Ones you’ve heard before.)
   1. __________________________________________________________
   2. __________________________________________________________
   3. __________________________________________________________

 

1. Write 1-6 NEW words or expressions (then ask a teacher to confirm.) 
   1. ______________________   d. ______________________________
   2. ______________________   e. ______________________________
   3. ______________________   f. _______________________________

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! 

Name: ________________________                                                                                                   Date: _______________
I’m listening to _________________________________                                                                  Length of audio: ______

CONTENT

1. Write one sentenceanswering what the audio/video was about?          


2. Write 1-2 sentences with details from the listening. (What did you understand?)

a. _____________________________________________________________
            b. _____________________________________________________________
 
LANGUAGE

1. Write 1-3 OLD words or expressions that you heard. (Ones you already knew.) __________________________________________________________ 
   __________________________________________________________
   __________________________________________________________

 

1. Write 1-2 NEW words or expressions (then ask a teacher to confirm.)    
   __________________________________________________________
   ​__________________________________________________________

Worksheets are FREE for a limited time. Get yours today!

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.

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.

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?

Just 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.

1. 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.

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.

Set 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.

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?

- 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.

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.

​

Having good conversation skills is an important skill to have no matter what language we're speaking. Parts of a good conversation are:

• asking good questions 
• active listening to the other person 
• asking follow-up questions to show that we're interested in what the other person is saying.

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.

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.

If 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. ​

​Take turns to come up, roll the dice, and do the task based on the number.