Instant ideas for awesome classes

It’s my birthday note – the first one, as I haven’t yet celebrated my own birthday on the blog. I want to thank you all for encouragement and support, for visiting my page and following me on Facebook – you’re awesome! – and, especially for my new readers I want to share a list of my most popular blog entries – they’re full of ideas you may adjust to various groups of students, so I believe you’ll find them useful.

I hope you’ll enjoy them!

10 lifesaving websites for ESL teachers

Sometimes you are just too tired to come up with a new activity, game or warm-up. I consider myself a lazy teacher (not for me the industrious cutting and laminating) so I made a list of the best websites that would save the day when I’m not really at my best.

Even if you aren’t as lazy as yours truly, try those websites and spice up your classes with a bit of something new.

10 short warm-ups to revise vocabulary

I love warm-ups, every teacher I’ve ever observed knows that! In my opinion, this stage of the lesson is crucial, as we make our students get into the world of our English lesson. It’s like the first impression – we only have one opportunity to make it awesome. A good warm-up may change our tired students into enthusiastic study-machines!

And start the class with them working from the start instead of observing us with “show me what you’ve got” attitude.

Teacher, let’s watch a film…

Whether you work with younger children or older learners, you’re bound to hear “teachaaaaaa… could we watch a fiiiiiiiiilm”. Some time ago I made a list of the films I could recommend for various age-and-stage groups.

Seeing there’s no Deadpool on the list I think I should update it, but for the time being you may use it as help to share nice films with your students.

Fill in the gaps with a bit of fun

We all have our type of English exercise that we dislike. As a student I really hated fill-in-the-blanks tasks, so as a teacher I’ve made sure my students have better fun on their classes.

This is the result of my endeavour with making fill-in-the-gap exercises fun in the classroom.

It worked for me, I must say…

7 Useful Websites for Teaching Kids

One of the recent notes proves I’m not the only one using technology to make my classes more interesting for kids. Here you’ll find a set of websites that will make your classes more fun, which is extremely important at the beginning of the school year when it’s really difficult for younger students to get back into the school routine.

Naturally, you should be careful with the amount of fun. English is also a means of teaching children how to suffer silently…

7 YouTube channels to spice up your lessons

It might be worrying, knowing that watching films is such a popular activity (at least judging by the notes popularity on my blog), but I’m not really surprised here, as the YouTube channels I shared in this post are simply fun, highly educational and basically awesome.

From funny culture-related channels to those pronunciation-oriented ones, you’ll find something for yourself and your students of various ages and linguistic levels.

Lateral puzzles, literal fun 🙂

Lateral thinking is key to creativity, and the ability to think out of the box is a skill highly praised among the employers. While the educational system per se is bound to limit students’ creativity to the significant extent, we can still introduce exercises that will help our students cherish their natural originality of thinking.

This note provides certain ideas on how to use English-related tasks to boost lateral thinking in our students… and ourselves.

It’s been some time since I started writing this blog, and I am really grateful for the support and encouragement from you. I’m planning to change some things on the blog to make it more exciting, so stay tuned!

Happy birthday to me and muchas gracias to you!