Let's learn about the weather!

 Recently I have presented emotion vocabulary with my students. You can find some ideas in my previous post. 

One more thing that we did, was actually stick the emotion cards on ice cream sticks and played them as puppets. 

So, I decided to play a little. I downloaded weather flashcards to introduce weather words to my students.

I showed them the words, we played pantomime and then we combined them with the emotion - words and made sentences. "It's rainy - I'm sad"

We also acted out the sentences.

It was a lot of fun!

Some lesson ideas

 

A wonderful idea that I heard on a Story telling webinar this week is improvising stories with story dice.

You can find this special dices at bookstores, in Greece I found some in Ianos and Flying Tiger. 

You can do this online as well over here. I am definitely going to try this in my next lessons.

And on today's lesson plan, we are going to play with the emotion cards I found on Twinkl.

First we are going to mime the emotions and then we are going to read simple phrases pretending to be happy, angry, sad etc! It's gonna be fun!!!

Teacher Diary: Week collection

 Here I am with some more activities from this week.

Working on the coursebooks was our main activity, but I always try to include some more games / ideas to make it more interesting.

• A very favourite activity when I teach body parts is picture dictation backwards. This means that the students write the word on a blank piece of paper where the body part would be if they drew it. So for example the word toe goes at the bottom edges of the paper.  When we have mentioned all the words we make an outline and we create a monster. Students LOVE it.

• Another activity that my students loved this week is find (hidden) objects game. We used the app from Super course (the publisher of the books we use), but you can find numerous free games (prented and online), I am posting a link from islcollective where you can find a lot of activities and exercises. 
• Grammar of the week was gerunds and infinnitives. So I decided to work with songs. Here is a compilation with songs you can use to teach this structure. 
• Another idea is to use Lyrics Training to practise both grammar, vocabulary and listening comprehension

More ideas to come ... 

Teacher diary : Weekend edition

It's been a long time since I've written over here, but I thought I'd start a new series of posts called "Teacher Diary", describing my preparations and reflecting on my lessons. 

Saturday

1. 1st Lesson: A2-B1 Level. English. Adult. Focussing on grammar mostly. We have a book, but my student prefers to work alone and just check the answers with me. They don't like writing/speaking so much, although I try to. Today's lesson was grammar/ vocabulary revision on the phenomena we had worked on the previous lessons. Lot's of mistakes, I needed to explain everything again. Just how to make my student understand that they have to actually use the vocabulary and grammar in their own examples. 

For homework I have sent them some exercises I created on my own, but a great website I use and recommend is Perfect English Grammar.

2. Lesson: B1 Level German. Teenager. We use Beste Freunde - Hueber. We are also preparing for a B1 exam. Their website contains a variety of materials according to level and A1-2 have also got intaractive exercises. We also watch Jojo sucht das Glück in DW, which is a great "Telenovela" for German learners. With interactive exercises and Teacher's guidebook. Students love it!

3. Lesson 3: A1/2 Level. German. Teenager: My student is supposed to take the A1 exams in May, so we have started working on some tests with not much success, I'm afraid. Let's hope for the best!

4. Lesson 4 got cancelled due to sports competition.

5. Lesson 5: C2 Level. English. Teenager. Not much creativity here as well, since we are preparing for a C2 exam in May. Reading tasks, vocabulary exercises, grammar and lots of speaking

6. Lesson 6: A1 Level. English. Child. We use Our World -Cengage. Although it's an old book, its interactive material is still fantastic. Lots of videos, songs, interactive exercises and games. This is usually a face to face lesson, but we had to do it online due to covid. We used Skype which was a bad idea, since my student could not have control of the games and got a bit bored. We did a lot of talking and reading though. 

Sunday

1. Lesson 1. A1 Junior English. Child. I had downloaded wonderful material on Day and Night activities. It contains lots of pictures, a maze, cutting and gluing, colouring and lots of speaking tasks. Unfortunately, my lesson got canceled, since the child did not want to cooperate at all. I know it's a Sunday morning and the young child wanted to sleep some more, or do ssomething else than studying, but they should have told me before I went over. Anyway, somemore free time to prepare my next lessons. 

 

2. Lesson 2: A2 Level, Greek, Adult. Todays lesson was about houses. I have downloaded some pictures of different kind of houses like the one in this picture and talked about then comparing them, practicing parts of the house, furniture and getting around in the neighborhood. Finally we read a diallogue about somebody renting their home and role-played a diallogue asking for information on the appartment that was supposed to be rented. 

I actually loved these pictures, especially the ones with the strange houses and I am going to use them as prompt for my German A2 lesson this week, along with description of places and people. 

No more lessons for today, but I still had to prepare for tomorrow for my medical student. (German B2/C1 level, Medical terminology). We have a book, but I also consult an online medical dictionary, which also has videos explaining medical prcedures in simple language. 

Well, this was more or less how my working weekend went. 

Tomorrow is another day