To teach the conjunctions of time, it is crucial that the students understand the meaning of the conjunctions. That is why I have created the following graphic organiser which I use to explain the meaning of the conjunctions: I print the picture and hand it out to my students. ADVERT: [showmyads] Then I explain the…
Dictations?! Really? Isn’t this method outdated, boring and non-communicative? Yes, it certainly isn’t modern or innovative, but it is useful. It provides feedback on listening and during a dictation the skill of writing gets some practise. Moreover, Paul Nation in his book “What Every EFL Teacher Should Know?” puts dictation among Language-Focused listening and speaking…
I love playing games with my students. They lower students’ anxiety and they give them a chance to practise the language. Moreover, in a game mistakes are welcome, and students find it easier to concentrate and perservere. Therefore, a well designed game supports the learners’ growth mindset and is better than a lot of worksheets….
Six years ago, I spent a lot of time working on a magazine for learners of English. I managed to produce three issues. Today, I feel it is time to share them. ADVERT: [showmyads] The first issue is about sports. There are several vocabulary exercises where students can learn the names of various sports. There…
In the previous two lessons, students learnt affirmative of the verb to be. They learnt the long and the short forms so now it is time to teach the negative form of the verb to be. But before we teach anything new, it is necessary to practise what they learnt in the previous lessons. First,…
In the previous lesson, I taught the affirmative of the verb TO BE and now it is time to revise the grammar and explain the short forms. First, we need to revise. Students need to revise a lot, or they will forget. So let’s start with revising the pronouns. Play, the following video. First, students…
I have already taught the verb to be many times. But this year I failed exemplarily. So I stopped and spent a week planning a sequence of lessons to really teach this basic grammar point. In these posts, I would like to share the lesson plans and materials I have created. To be able to…
The present simple tense is the most important tense for elementary students of English to learn. To be able to communicate intelligibly they need to master at least the basic rules. If they don´t they will struggle with many other grammar rules. Therefore it is crucial that they learn this tense. But what does it…
Reading aloud is one of the most frequently used activities at schools. At the same time, it is one of the most discussed activities in ELT and many teachers refuse to use it. In this post, I would like to discuss the problems reading aloud poses and a possible solution. The first problem, and one…
In this post, I would like to share three activities that stood out in my teaching this week. They worked very well and I think that my students learned a lot from them. I hope you will find them useful and entertaining, too. The first activity is a speaking activity where students use relative clauses….
For some students, sentence transformation is the test they are really scared of. They feel that they cannot form the sentences correctly and often fail their exams just because they mess this part up. However, as a learner and teacher of English, I feel that this test is simple. I cannot help thinking that the…
In my previous post I offered a set of materials to help you teach the 10 most frequent irregular verbs in English. Now, there are a couple of activities to teach, or if you are a student to learn, another set of 10 irregular verbs. We give you a set of activities to help you…
Recently I published a post on irregular verbs which I am really proud of. In this post, there is an app which helps students learn the past tense of the 52 most frequent irregular verbs in English. Using the app, over 80% of my students managed to learn all the past tenses of the verbs….
When I was a child, the Snake game was incredibly popular. Of course, that was a long time ago. The games have changed since but when I see how popular the game Slitherio (a new version of the Snake game) is, I believe children have not changed that much. And they might appreciate if we…
In our previous post, we tried to explain how to form the past continuous tense in English. In this post, we will try to show you when you should use the past continuous tense.
Adverbs of frequency are a really a complicated grammar. Even though many textbooks teach these words very early on, their usage is not simple and there are many exceptions to the rules. But as I have to present it to elementary students, I try to keep them as simple as possible and I keep all…
English with Youtubers? Are you joking!? Youtubers use horrible English and their stories are about nothing! They use F words all the time and they have no ethics! For example, the most popular Youtuber showed some anti-Jew messages on his channel. Simply put, these videos cannot be shown at schools! A few days ago I…
I have already shared many materials to teach the past simple tense here. You can find activities to teach irregular verbs, a great post on teaching questions in the past simple tense and a post on teaching negative in the past simple tense. However, this post is different. Here, I would like to share a…
Teaching the past continuous tense, you need to do two things. First, you have to teach the form. Second, you need to teach the usage of this tense. In my experience, if you teach both at the same time, students get sloppy with the form. Once, you start to correct them, they get confused because…
Grammar Up is a new, holistic approach to teaching and learning English grammar. When you take English in school, you learn one piece of grammar at a time. After a while, you become confused by all the rules, and you forget most of them. Native speakers don’t know the rules for the grammar. They use…