Teaching Cheat Day? Make it fun!

There are days one literally can’t even. When you’re a teacher, suddenly lessons seem terribly long, material to be covered is so boring you can’t bring yourself to teach it, your students… I’m not going to continue – simply, you have a Bad/Lazy Day. You wish you had been a teacher a hundred years ago when you could’ve tell your students to sit quietly and read a book… and they would’ve actually listen!

Alas, those times are long gone, and nowadays we need to teach, nurture, mentor and entertain. Usually it’s a normal task (once you get the hang of it), but sometimes you feel like running away and a mere thought of teaching is killing you. Fortunately, you can always rely on your teaching buddies and their ideas. You can also rely on me, as I already found some great sources of inspiration:

• Make a great (and long!) project that is a great revision

• Bring in a murder mystery to the classroom

• Use twinkl and let the lesson roll

• Make your students create a great game

• …or any game, it’s also fun

All of the above are the ideas made to engage students and give you a moment of peace. With little or no preparation you may still give a valuable lesson where your students will learn, revise, produce and have fun. Having a slightly worse day happens to everyone, so accept it and try to have fun anyway.

However, sometimes the situation is critical. In the morning you feel eager to work and suddenly you feel sick, you’ve caught a cold or simply suffer an attack of springtime blues and you need a teaching painkiller, like, now. Luckily, all you need to do is to find a classroom with an interactive whiteboard and the Internet and hurray! You’re saved, your students will have a good lesson and nobody will ever suspect you’re not your usual awesome teaching self!

All you need to do is to find Games to Learn English: it’s a great source of instant games and a lot of fun. From matching words with pictures, revising comparatives, guessing an animal (my favourite exercise) or even choosing an IWB activity. You need something to make your students interested in English for 90 minutes without you speaking a word? Just click on the link and let your students experiment with all the games they may fancy!

The games are aimed at a relatively low level of English with pretty much all the content being around elementary or pre-elementary level. But why is this page such a great solution for a virtually-no-teacher-class? Because, as Owen Dwyer (the author of the page) explains, the games are intended to be the resource that language learners can use independently.

Which means, you can introduce the website to your students, ask them to have fun in the classroom by experimenting with various educational games… and then encourage them to continue the fun at home! After this I don’t think anyone will suspect you’ve just had a slightly lazy teaching day…

Enjoy!