Daily Writing Prompts

The website The Teacher's Corner  has a useful section called   Daily Writing Prompts   which provides a list of writing prompts for every day of the year, focusing on special events. Perfect for CLIL projects.

Food & drinks TABOO

Everybody knows how to play this game, and it's perfect to work on definitions. You can practise the topic FOOD & DRINKS and adjectives related to them.

The follow-up activity is to ask your students to invent more cards!

CLICK HERE for an editable .doc   version.

Classroom Language Posters

I hope these posters are useful for your beginners! Click on the pictures:

See-Think-Wonder

The website www.pobble365.com  is really useful to find good pictures to do this thinking routine (I SEE - I THINK - I WONDER).
I did it in class and I recorded my students' answers so that I could type the correct sentences later, print them and laminate them. This way, my students have a nice poster with the vocabulary of the unit and affirmative and interrogative sentences about it. This is the result:

HIGH or HIGHLY?

KWL: London

Since the topic this month was The Town and its places, my students have learnt a lot about the city of  London. We started with a KWL to detect their previous knowledge (I Know) about London and their interests (I Want to know):

Then, I gave the questions to the students for them to find out the answers. With the results, I prepared a PPT to see the answers in class and continue the explanation of sociocultural aspects:

I told them to download the App Kahoot and the next day I asked them questions about what we learnt in class. Some days later, I asked the same questions and some more using www.plickers.com this time.
The results were amazing: an average of 60%  in a class that normally has poor results!. The final day, they filled the last column of the KWL (I have Learnt), so I could check that they had really learnt a lot:

International Day of Women

This is my contribution to the 8th of March.
First of all, a PowerPoint Presentation of 20 outstanding women from English-speaking countries. I have tried to include many countries and different races and backgrounds. I use simple vocabulary because I intend to use it with very young teenagers, too. I have used pictures from Wikimedia Commons and the template from www.free-power-point-templates.com

Next, a memory game to match the names and photos with their achievements. Grey cards are for deceased women, so the students have to practise Past Tenses. The verbs are in brackets to force them to think about the tense of each sentence.  (DOC / PDF)

We continue with a similar activity: a domino.  (DOC / PDF)

 

Finally, the students can play Who's who? to practise questions in Present and Past tenses (Is she alive? Was she a writer?)   (DOC / PDF)

Clothes jigsaws

I found the idea for this game at "El Tarro de los Idiomas", a blog for teachers of Spanish as a second language. Print the document and cut up the pieces. The students have to match the pictures to the correct word so that they form the complete figure again. There is only one possible solution.

I think it's great to practise vocabulary and improve your students' cooperative skills. This way, they can revise vocabulary and learn more difficult words. Moreover, it also caters for mixed-ability classes.

On the contrary, if your students prefer competition, you can use them as a kind of domino (the first student that runs out of cards wins).