Skipping the lesson plan...

It's been more than a couple of months that the school year has actually started and I have already ditched the plan... more than once....
Well, I have always been a supporter of lesson plans. We have to know what we are doing right?
But sometimes you have to improvise...
Maybe because students need more practise, maybe because you see that students are interested in the subject.
This year I am lucky to have students in different languages, levels and purpose, so I have to prepare a lot. I have to be inventive. And as it seems I have to improvise.
Today I will share some examples of what I have done with students of various levels.

Learning the ABC
Some people believe that teaching juniors is a piece of cake. It's not. The letters are different. The pronunciations are different, you have to know to teach phonics, think of new interesting games.
One day I had been practising teaching the letters and how they sound with flashcards. Although the flashcards were colourful and the pictures funny, the children started getting bored.
Two games came to my mind right on the spot.
1. We spread the flashcards on the floor with no particular order and I started calling the letters. The children were supposed to jump on the flash card (or next to it) whenever they heard the letter. The more difficult variation was to call words beginning with the particular letter.
2. While the letters were spread on the floor, I took some, without the kids noticing. The game was to find the missing letters. You can play this with numbers and objects as well

Have you got?
I noticed that my b junior students had trouble remembering the right form of the verbs. I printed pictures of animals and improvised a card game. Students had a list with all the animals from the game and they had to ask the person next to them "Have you got i.g. a lion?" their partner had to say "yes, I have" or "no, I haven't". If they had the animal that was asked, they had to give it to the person who asked. If you repeat that 20 times, believe me, it is easier to remember the correct forms of the verb "have got". The same can be done changing the cards with pictures of people and names and change the verb "Are you Tim?" - "yes, I am", "no, I'm not"


British council videos

Whatever you teach, vocabulary, grammar etc, there is always something on the British council websites for children and teenagers. For example while talking about traveling with one of my B1-2 students, I found this wonderful text with exercises that we immediately worked on.

TED talks

Going on more advanced levels, TED talks is a wonderful idea.
A couple of weeks ago, our B2 text book mentioned Sugar Mitra and the "hole on the wall project". When I told my student that I had actually attended one of his talks and everything I knew about this project, she was thrilled. We actually ended up watching the TED talk (pausing the video to comment and check if my student understood what she was watching, asking her questions). After the video I asked her what she thought of the project and if she thought that computers could actually replace teachers (yes, the hot debate subject). As homework, she expressed herself writing her opinion to this question.

There will be soft rains....
This is actually my favourite. This year I am working with a student who will take university entrance exams next year. So I thought that I could slowly introduce her to the actual exam structure, what kind of exercises there are and how we write the essay etc. So I brought her last year's exam paper. I was pleasantly surprised to see that in the essay subject, they mentioned one of my favourite sci fi writers, Ray Bradbury and his book Fahrenheit 451.

So we started talking about the book, the story, the conclusions that are to come from reading this book and of course I shared my enthusiasm talking about my favourite book of the same author, Martian Chronicles. We ended up listening to the short story :

We talked about war, its consequences and the feelings that provokes.
My student then had to write an essay "how ignorance can lead to human distinction and what we should do to prevent it" (influenced by both stories)
The best thing was that when I went for the next lesson, I saw both books on her desk (I almost cried)

I can understand that if you work at a school, you can't always improvise. But you can start small. Try a game, or an extra text/video.
I have never lost anything by improvising .... On the contrary my students were really interested and wanted to do more.

More thoughts to share soon...