When you teach the concept of countability in English, students have to learn to use the words A, SOME, THE, ANY, AN in front of the nouns correctly. To decide correctly, students have to take several mental steps.In this post I explain the mental process and I offer your students a chance to practise it…
Recently, I have been reading a book about learning and memory. It contains a lot of facts, but the longer I read it the more it seems obvious that there is only one way to learn anything. And that is by learning. To sum it up, all the research shows that the more time you…
It is a well accepted fact that students remember things better if they discover them for themselves. However, it is a real challenge to design our materials in such a way that we allow the students to discover the rules. I have tried to create such materials for my students and they were really successful….
The present perfect tense is one of the most difficult tenses for learners of English. It is not easy to form the tense correctly as you need the verb HAVE or HAS and the past participle. Moreover, the usage is very specific and many students feel that they could do with the past simple tense…
This is my first post on writing. I have not written a post on writing because my students do not like to write and I felt that the textbook activities were enough for them. However, as I have to observe my younger colleagues, it so happened that I saw them teaching the same thing twice….
When I was looking for some materials to teach the present simple tense of the verb to be I was rather unpleasantly surprised by the fact that there are very few speaking activities. Obviously, the verbs IS/AM/ARE are taught to elementary students whose vocabulary is severely limited. But, there should be some speaking activities anyway….
I have covered nearly all the tenses there are on my website. But it is the first time I deal with the present perfect continuous tense. It is not an easy tense, but I think it is not really difficult either. To help you teach this tense there is an infographic, a worksheet, an audio…
After teaching present simple to my elementary students, we wrote a test and I collected the most common mistakes my students made. I analysed the mistakes and prepared games and exercises to help my students learn from their mistakes. In this post there is an infographic with all the mistakes, their corrections and explanations. Then…
The verb TO BE is the most important verb in English. Unfortunately, it is the most irregular verb in English, too. However, as all students of English manage to master its forms in the end, there is no reason to dispair. This mastery comes through practise. In this post I would like to share with…
I have created this post for my students to learn the seven days of the week. They are not difficult to remember but some students confuse them. In this post there is a simple infographic, a song, a worksheet and two games. I hope you like this post and find it useful for your students…
This is the first post in a series on irregular verbs. It is called irregular verbs worksheets because in these posts I am going to publish worksheets in which your students can practise irregular verbs. There will be 10 irregular verbs each time and at least four exercises to practise them. Moreover, there will be…
To count uncountable nouns in English students need to know the containers they are most often sold or served in. In the textbook I teach at school I need to teach six of these containers: a loaf, a tin, a packet, a glass, a cup and a bar. In this post you can find a…
Irregular verbs in English are forever. No matter how you teach them, the students resist. I have already designed about twelve different ways to teach irregular verbs and my students still struggle. I have tried to teach the verbs in context, through rhymes, straightforward and in songs but to no avail. However, the last method,…
The phrase USED TO is one of the highly productive chunks in English. I have already published a post on Used to but I have created several new activities since, and I would like to share those with you. So, in this post you will find several USED TO grammar activities which will help you…
Do your students struggle with the words somebody, anybody, something, anything, everything, everybody, nothing and nobody? Do they get these basic words wrong nearly every time? If your answer is yes, then this post is just for you. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post I would like to share with you several tools to help your…
A few days ago the scholars Mélodie Garnier and Norbert Schmitt published a list of most common phrasal verbs in English. Moreover, they listed the most frequent meanings of the verbs. The pedagogical impact of this discovery is really big. Finally we have the list of the phrasal verbs we should teach. You can see…
The usage of Some and Any in English is quite simple. Some is used in positive statements, requests or offers and ANY is used in questions and negative sentences. However, many textbooks confuse students by mixing this simple concept with the concept of countability. In this post I will try to keep the explanation as…
All the pedagogy books tell you that pictures are much more memorable than words. There is even this saying “A picture is worth thousand words”. So why don’t we use this fact and use pictures for teaching for example irregular verbs? Unfortunately, things are not that easy. In fact, the research shows that it is…
Once elementary students master forming questions in the present simple tense, their communicative ability grows by hundreds of percent. Students then can ask nearly about anything, and all of a sudden they can communicate meaningfully. However, for many teachers the questions are a nightmare because only a few students do really learn to form the…
Halloween is coming, and it would be nice if we had a set of fresh activities for this occasion. Children remember everything, and it is pretty embarrassing when you recycle something and the children shout out- “I know this!!! We’ve already done it.” Or, “My sister told me that you did this last year with…