So this is Christmas. And once again I am looking for some interesting materials to use in my lessons. But I don’t want to recycle as the students often remember very well what we did last year or the year before. Lucky kids, as I can hardly remember what I did yesterday :-).
In my opinion, vocabulary is the most important part of language learning. If you know some words and no grammar, you can communicate. However, if you know a lot of grammar and no words, communication is impossible. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post I would like to give you a chance to enrich your students vocabulary…
Placement tests are extremely important if you do not know your students well and you need to know what to teach them. Further, these tests can be used to measure whether your students made any progress during a certain period of time. Placement tests are often professionally produced and sold for a lot of money….
Weather is one of the most common conversational topics in Britain. Therefore, if you know the basic vocabulary, you can talk to 60 million people. With 60 million conversation opportunities, it is well worth the little effort you need to put in.To make it as enjoyable as possible, there are several activities to help you…
Telling the time is something I have to teach every year. And to be honest I have not been very successful. Even gifted adults struggled. And this year I faced even bigger challenge. I was supposed to teach this to a group of challenged children who cannot tell the time in their MT. So I…
When I started teaching the English alphabet I was really sure that it will be fun and easy to achieve. My students had no problem learning the alphabet itself, but when they should have used it, they were making a lot of mistakes. I have tried everything. We tried using finger alphabet, some information gap…
There are many different states and nationalities in the world and we cannot know all of them. However, it is necessary that you know your own nationality and the name of your state. Moreover, I think that you should know at least the names of the most populous countries. That is why I have created…
Adaptive learning has been the new buzz word in Language teaching community for some time. It sounds so promising. Students will learn only those things they do not know and they will practise what is needed for them to remember. And of course everything will be computer based and the students will be able to…
I have already published a post on numbers. However, there I expected that you know the basics and that you need to learn a bit more about them. This post is different. Here, I would like to start at the very beginning and present the basic numbers from 0 to 99. To achieve this there…
There are some words you cannot live without in any language, and greetings certainly belong among those words and phrases. In this post I aim at introducing and teaching nine basic greetings for elementary students. To achieve this goal I there is a nice mind map and several games to practise these words. In this…
Recently we have published a placement test based mostly on grammar. Some of our readers commented that a vocabulary placement test might be useful too. That was why we have tried to create a test which would show you how many words you know. A part of the test is partly based upon the test…
Means of transport is one of the topics you cannot avoid. Nowadays people travel a lot and they often have to do it on daily basis. And thus it is one of the most natural topics for a conversation in a class. Here you can learn the names of several means of transport and you…
Recently I published a post on TV programmes vocabulary. In this post I would like to add a few activities to help the teachers prepare a great lesson on this topic and to give students a few more activities to practise the vocabulary. ADVERT: [showmyads] Unlike in the previous posts, there are several worksheets which…
Everyone watches TV sometimes. Thus, to be able to speak about what they watch students need some specialised vocabulary. The aim of the following post is to introduce and teach 13 names of TV programmes. ADVERT: [showmyads] To achieve this, we have prepared the following activities: a video, a mind map, a pictionary and two…
In my last post I try to teach 11 common similes in English. However, as some students still feel that they need more practise, I have decided to produce this post too. This post contains a visually appealing demonstration of all the 11 similes, a short film to learn the phrases and a dictation exercise….
A year ago George Woolard published a book called Messaging. There he suggests that learners of a foreign language should learn the whole phrases and sentences. By learning the whole chunks the students will later be able to produce the language quicker and more precisely. ADVERT [showmyads] I think that I can agree with this…
In this post I would like to introduce about 20 new words connected with towns. These words are neccessary if you want to speak about the place where you live or stay. The vocabulary is for elementary and pre-intermediate students and it covers different basic features which can be found in towns and cities. ADVERT:…
To say dates in English is quite simple. However, as there are two ways to do this, students often get confused and mix both of them together. I hope that this post will help them clarify this extremely important area. To be able to say dates in English correctly, it is necessary to know the…
In this post you should learn to read and write numbers in English. To help you with this I have created a simple graphical presentation and three games. I hope you will find them useful and that it will help you learn English better. Have a look at the graphic and read the instructions how…
My friend keeps asking me whether there is a logical way to see if he should use DO or MAKE. I always told him that there is not and that he should learn the phrases by heart. However, when he asked me for the third time I sat down and created a logical division for…