In the last half a year I have taught this, in my opinion easy, piece of language and I have failed miserably in both cases. And on the basis of this failure I built this post. It contains a clear explanation in the form of a mind map, a worksheet and two games to practise…
In the first part of the comic story we met Jack and we learnt about 30 new vocabulary item. Now, it is time to finish the story and learn some more vocabulary. In this post there are several activities to learn or teach the new vocabulary, two games to check your vocabulary knowledge and comprehension…
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…
As a teacher working with a textbook you often need to pre-teach a lot of new vocabulary, because otherwise the text on the following page will be incomprehensible to your students, or you will face a barrage of questions „What does this word mean?“ However, when you scourge the literature for methods how to do…
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…
Have you tried our vocabulary placement test for elementary students, and it was too easy for you? Have you scored close to 2000? Then this is the vocabulary test you should take. Here we test the words which belong between 2,000 and 5,000 most frequent words in English. ADVERT: [showmyads] There are 60 questions and…
Students like reading comics. Comics are often the only thing students read. When I started an extensive reading project last year, students did not mind reading comics, however when we moved to short stories, more than half of them stopped reading and started to hate the programme. On the basis of this experience I have…
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…
For many learners of English the slight differences between the words BIG vs. LARGE and HIGH vs. TALL are very difficult to understand. In this post I will try to make the differences clearer and easy to remember. To achieve this, I have come up with two videos, two quizzes and two mind maps. I…
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…
Kate Chopin was an American author from the end of the 19th century and she wrote very interesting stories. I have taken one of the shorter ones and simplified it for pre-intermediate students. The Kiss is a story about love and money. It is about a girl who has to choose between real love and…
“What does maths have to do with learning English?” you might ask. Many people believe that nothing. In fact many wrongly believe that you can be good either at maths or at English. However, I think that mathematics and English have more in common than it might seem at the first sight. To be good…
Some posts take quite a long time to produce, but this one was an extreme case. Four people participated on it and I think we have produced a great material to teach vocabulary connected with sports. ADVERT: [showmyads] In my opinion there is everything. There is a video to help students with the pronunciation of…
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…
Many verbs in English are often followed by the same preposition. Therefore it is best to learn them togehter from the beginning. However, even if you do this it is neccessary to sum it up from time to time. ADVERT [showmyads] The following summary was created for my elementary students of English and it contains…
The environment is one of the most frequently discussed topics in the world. However, to be able to speak about this topic you need some basic vocabulary. In this post I try to introduce some words related to the topic of Environment. Later you can practise the new words in games. ADVERT: [showmyads] In 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:…