Ideas and suggestions to use in your classroom.
Are you interested in an authentic, integrated-skills activity that can be adapted to any level, incorporated into any theme, and prepared in less than 10 minutes?
The activity is storytelling and it’s a universal feature of all human cultures.
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Happy Canada Day! Even though we celebrate Canada on one special day, there are so many lesson ideas you could use to continue to learn about Canada throughout the month of July. Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with.
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Do you belong to a book club? My mother-daughter book club is nearing its fourth anniversary! We started it as a way to encourage reading in our daughters, and four years later, not only do we have voracious young readers, but we have also built a neighbourhood community.
I started to wonder if this concept could be applied to my teaching context. I teach LINC online with LINC Home Study. I had attended a few webinars online regarding extensive reading and decided to try it out.
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Do you ever take your students on fields trips to a museum or art gallery? Are there barriers to these field trips like time, transportation, money, or even child minding or accessibility? Have you ever thought of doing a virtual field trip?
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The cherry blossoms are out! It’s spring and finally warm enough to ride my bike to work. I do my best thinking on that bike. With a new semester starting, I find myself reflecting on the semester gone by. Peddling on cold, rainy days tends to cause me to remember my failures, but on warm, sunny mornings, I recall my successes. For 16 years I have been teaching university prep writing, grammar, reading, speaking, and listening to students from around the world.
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What is an infographic?
Infographics are a contemporary means of transmitting information on media platforms. They appear as printed or digital infographic displays at hospitals, airports, shopping malls and more, and deliver complex information in a visually concise format. The first infographics I remember were positioned in the corners of the USA Today newspaper. They drew my eyes towards them and informed me about trends, recent events or celebrities in many sections of the newspaper.
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Can you feel spring in the air? I sure can! If you are like me, you probably cannot wait to be basking in the warm sunlight. As spring approaches and the sun starts to warm us up, it is important to consider how we can enjoy the warmth and stay sun safe as well.
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Can you name all of the Kardashians? What is Fortnite? Are fidget spinners still a thing? What’s a meme?
Do you use pop culture references in your ESL lessons? I do! Let’s explore some of the disadvantages and advantages of doing so.
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Last week, I read over my students’ poems and was reminded how much I love my job. As teachers, we need to savour these pleasures and summon them during the more tedious moments. My students, mostly from Asia, are in a year-long EAP foundation program at Ryerson University. I asked them to write a poem based on “Where I Am From,” by George Ella Lyon.
The scholastic objective was to get my students to explore their identities, but my personal objective was to learn more about their families, their ambitions, their countries…their lives. In class, we went through the author’s life, stanza by stanza. We examined the details, the imagery, and the metaphors. Then my students went home and wrote their own versions.
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Do you ever teach CLB 5 narrative paragraph writing? Do your students usually write something with pencil on paper that they later discard? Have you ever thought of using Storybird to engage and enhance writing skills or create a class anthology of stories?
Publish it
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