1. Factor in ‘wiggle breaks’ We all get stiff and achy when sitting at a computer screen all day, and it’s no different for our learners. When planning your online lessons make sure to plan breaks more frequently than you would normally, and encourage your learners to get up, move
Each month in this new blog post series, Katherine offers five practical and engaging classroom activities which all use the same photo as a starting point. The ideas can be adapted to work with all ages and levels and are designed to recycle language in an engaging way while developing
Welcome to the first post in the Life around the World Contest! Each month, we will release a photo from a cover of Life Second Edition on the In Focus Blog. We want you to submit your best guess of where in the world this photo was taken. Try to tell
Sometimes you can tell that your students are going to doze off as soon as the lesson starts. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, despite making a ‘brilliant beginning,’ you can sense the energy levels start to flag as your lesson progresses. A quick switch, getting your students up and out of
A simple hack to control language level In the first post of this blog series TED Talks work for all levels: Try it!, I talked about how TED Talks can be used in the classroom for students at any level, as long as the activities that support them are level-appropriate.
Teenage students have a famously short attention span, and with plenty of other distractions around them, you need to get them hooked as soon as they walk into the classroom. That’s why I often say that a lesson can be ‘won or lost’ in the first five minutes. In this
Why use projects in your young leaner English classroom? Learning with projects is experiential learning and learning which motivates children, since they get to do what they like and get to avoid what they don’t like. Don’t we wish that all learning would be like that? For us, as well?
What’s the best level for introducing TED Talks? All levels, including beginners. Teachers and learners love TED Talks because they feature big, fascinating ideas that learners want to talk about. And with the right TED Talk, one that offers a big idea and the opportunity for students to learn and
Here’s a question for you. How often do you use the listening scripts in the back of the book for follow-up work or additional activities? Be honest! Now, I’m going to guess most of you are thinking ‘not often’, and you wouldn’t be alone. From my experience of doing countless
Last week we looked at different easy to prepare grammar games, but when it comes to games vocabulary comes out king – there are literally hundreds of different vocabulary games out there. In this blog we’ll look at some of my favourites, but before we do that I want to