Last week I was teaching past perfect in one of my classes and suddenly one of the students exclaimed: “Finally we are learning something new.” And by new she meant useful as well. I am not sure how useful this tense might be for people who want to speak English but it is certainly very…
Have you been wondering what the big shock for Alan was? The story continues here. Once again you can learn 16 new words and practise them in a game. Then you can check your comprehension with a mind map which once again serves as a worksheet too. The next chapter of the story Two Dates…
The first chapter of the story Two Dates proved to be quite popular. The story will have 4 chapters in all. Here is the second one. Here is a mind map for the second chapter of the story Two Dates. In my opinion the ideal way to proceed with this post is to learn the…
This morning I was preparing a presentation for one of my classes on separable and not separable phrasal verbs and suddenly an interesting pattern appeared. It seems that the fact that the particle is separable can be guessed according to the particle that is used. I am not sure whether it works all the time,…
I don’t know whether anyone will be interested in this mini series called Two Dates. However, as all the research shows that extensive reading helps students improve their English I put it here. There is a short story cut into four parts and a mind map which can serve as a comprehension worksheet. Moreover, you…
To learn Passive voice it is necessary to know the past participles. If you do not know the past participles go to our post on Past participle and learn the irregular verbs first. Once you do not have any problems with past participles, it is time to learn the Passive voice in English. Passive voice…
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…
Some time ago I presented here an infographics on present perfect tense. This infographic contains a lot of interesting information but when I tried to teach the present perfect tense using it, I found out that I failed. That is why I have prepared this new one where I try to introduce the form and…
Several weeks ago I published a post on Conditionals. In the post, I tried to cover all the conditionals in one mind map and I think that I succeeded.However, the post was unnecessarily complicated for lower level students. Therefore I created a simpler one for lower intermediate students who need to know only the second…
Last week I taught passive and present perfect tense. I thought that I was well prepared but in both cases we encountered one big problem. The students could not form the past participles correctly. So they fought with the past participles and completely ignored the grammar taught. ADVERTISEMENT: [showmyads] So now I know that we…
The word “HOW” is one of the most productive words in English. It helps us create meaningful questions and sentences. The word “HOW” combines with many other words to create these questions. In this post I try to introduce the basic phrases “How much”, “How many”, “How often”, “How well”, “How long”, “How far” and…
I had been using these phrases long before I learnt that they were a grammar item. However, as I have to teach them to my students at school, I have created this short post. There is just a simple graphical presentation of the phrases and two games to practise them. To practise phrase there is…
Two days ago we encountered a simple exercise in our textbook. Students’ task was to fill in the missing prepositions. Even though my students are strong lower intermediate students who can understand a lot of English and speak quite fluently, they were not able to use the correct prepositions. Although the students met the adjectives…
In this post, I try to explain what countable and uncountable nouns are. When I speak with native speakers of English they often tell me that the concept of countability in English is absolutely natural. “You simply know which noun is countable and which is not.” However, this natural feeling is nearly impossible to teach….
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…
In my opinion Plants are one of the worst covered vocabulary topics in ELT. That is why, I have created the following post. There is a pictionary with all the words, a mind map, a video and four games to practise the vocabulary. I hope you will find these words useful. Plants – vocabulary video…
This is quite a simple grammar point – adjectives with the endings ed or ing. The more annoying it is when students use the endings incorrectly. In this post you can find a mind map, two games and a BBC presentation on this topic. I hope it will work fine for you and that you will…
This will be quite a short post. But sometimes easy does it. So, I hope it will be the case. I would love to explain the usage and form of Used to here. To achieve this I have created the following mind map: Used to – mind map In this mind map I try to…
Many elementary students feel they cannot see the difference between these two tenses. To help them I have created a rap which explains the grammar and gives some example sentences, two mind maps explaining everything simply and several games to practise this grammar point. I hope you will find it useful. Present tenses – mind…
Many people think that the topic animals is suitable only for children. Thus the learners learn the names of twenty animals when they are young and they think it is enough. However, intermediate students need to know more animals than the twenty they learnt as children. That is why I have created the following post….