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.

This lesson will be using the Ted Talk by Simon Sinek called How Great Leaders Inspire Action. (Video below).

AGE & LEVEL: Advanced Adult Learners and Professional Classes

Lesson Focus: Concept Listening and Responding

Before we get into how to mentally handle these situations to turn a bad situation into a good situation, always remember your basic troubleshooting steps for an unstable connection.

• Check how many programs I have running.
• Close your chat platform (Skype, Zoom, Google Hangout, etc) and open it again.
• If it still persists, I normally ask my student to restart their computer at the same time I restart my computer.
• I will usually take this time to restart the wifi router at the same time.

With this being said, let's get into the three tips for you to remember next time this happens to you.

Don't play the blame game. Nobody likes to be blamed for either one. Even if you're positive the problem isn't on your end, it isn't in good taste to say something like, "Well, I just had a class and it went fine, so the problem must be on your end." It's always good to search for a solution. Even though the situation stinks, we just have to deal with it and move on and look for some fresh air.

Relax, these things happen. This isn't the first time you or your student has dealt with technological problems and connection issues, and it won't be the last. Since you can't control the technology gods, worry about what you CAN control. You can do your best to help the student have a good memory and good experience with your lesson. A few things you can do to create the best experience possible are:

• Offer to stay with the student late to make up for lost minutes of the class.
• Stay late in future lessons to make up for lost time.
• If you've lost a significant amount of time dealing with this, reschedule the class or offer a free class for the student.

These kinds of gestures will go a long way to grow your relationship and the trust between you and your student.

After you get your connection issue worked through, you can use this authentic material as a language lesson teaching a whole list of new vocabulary, phrasal verbs, and expressions from this real context situation. Some of the vocabulary and expressions that could come up:

• (the sound/video) is breaking up
• it's freezing
• you're pixilated 
• your picture is fuzzy
• can you hear me now?
• choppy
• you're going in and out
• let's reconnect
• let's restart our computer
• Etc.

If you are still having trouble, you can always switch to your phone to finish the class. 

I've found most students are understanding of this situation. However, some people might not be very understanding, in which case, you'll just have to deal with that and let them go. People are people after all.

Pre-teach certain vocabulary from the text. Along with the Vocabulary Match from the PDF, there are plenty of vocabulary words to review that will show up on the Kahoot!

A bump
​A skull
Decade
Mostly
To bend (our necks)
To hunch (over)
An angle
​       An unnatural angle

If you've never used Kahoot before: 

1. Go here to play the Kahoot! with your students!
2. Have your kids take out their phones or classroom computers and go to Kahoot.it
3. Enter the game ID
4. Create a Name

Bring a scale.
Put things on the scale and review numbers and weights.
Choose something in the class or bring something in that weighs 4.5 kg to show how much the head weighs.
Time our how long some students can hold that in an unnatural position.
              (Ex. Hold a heavy book out to the side.)

​This will give a didactic touch to the article.

Let's face it, sometimes our classes can see a Kahoot lesson as a free class. (Especially teens)
​
To keep your students honest and giving effort PLUS an extra reward for the winners, give a small assignment to everybody except the top three teams​ as a prize.

Assignment Ideas:

• Define or write examples of vocabulary words
• Write answers for a 3 to 5 Discussion Questions from the article
• Choose an activity from the Breaking News English mini lesson

- Learn about some of the dangers of using mobile phones too much
​- What else can you find?

If you're interested in other classes like this or getting worksheets and PDFs to take to your classes, support Jesse on Patreon, and he will help you in the classroom.

To print out the article, go to BreakingNewsEnglish.com or go here to print it out. Thanks!