At the end of last semester I was wrestling with how to work on pronunciation. Alas, I was tired of hearing “Il essssssssssssst anglaissssss” and so I started to brainstorm ways students might be able to work on this problem without me. This particular pronunciation issue is, in my opinion, an input and reading issue. …
This last summer I spent some time with my six year old cousin. He has some speech issues and sees a speech therapist weekly and is not, in general, a great talker…yet. However he loves playing the Guess Who game. Do you know this game? You have cards with images on them that you slide …
Sometimes I’m a little late to the technology party. Until yesterday when I had to reset my phone, I’d hardly used the voice tools on my phone. And then yesterday I fell in love with Google Assistant. Though the whole idea of talking to an object feels odd to me, I am super excited about …
When I was doing my student teaching (in English) our methods teacher said something like, “The complexity of your language is a reflection of your complexity of thought.” While I can get behind this statement for a native language, this isn’t true for a second language. I mean, I’m entirely capable of complex thought, but …
It’s Back to School time!! Officially school started over a week ago at the high school and I don’t go back to school at the college for another week. Here are three no/low prep activities you can do with any class, but the newbies. (For my take on starting with the with the newbies see …
Not every activity in a textbook is awful. And sometimes, with just a small tweak, they can be pretty darn good. The Tweak So my friend Lewie (You know Lewie, right? Everyone knows Lewie!) Lewie has been talking a lot about giving a real purpose to student communication. I took this idea and tweaked the “interview your …
A couple of weeks ago I had a short exchange on Twitter about what to do the first day after vacation. I was thought “Ooh, I know this one!” For me there’s only one activity to do after a vacation or weekend and that’s to talk about what you did. Think about it- what do …
18 Mix and Match Activities to Talk about the Weekend Read More »
Two weeks ago at my Instructional Coach training, the trainer had us do an amazingly simple partner activity. We divided a sticky into four quadrants and in each one wrote a word: Winter, Summer, Fall, Spring then we had to stand up and find a partner for each square. We wrote the name of that …
I am always up for some good number practice. In my perfect lesson plan there would be some attention to numbers every day- I just feel like students always need more practice. Of course, there’s a ton of ways for students to practice listening to numbers, but not so many for them to practice speaking …
A few weeks ago I was about to do an activity where I knew I was going to push students to expand their answers (Angelina Jolie is a better actress because …..) that it got me thinking about ways we can challenge students to do than just respond with yes or no; because in addition to …
Five Activities to Challenge Students Beyond Yes and No Read More »
