Get Ready For School: Teacher’s Pack

Sometimes I take a look at my old notes (after all I’ve been writing this blog for a while) and once in a while I see a post that makes me go like “aaah, yes, that was a great exercise, I had so much fun with my students“. And then, I either share this post on my regular #tbt (throwback Thursday) or, well, forget about it.

But this time I had a plan! A plan so cunning you could pin a tail to it and call it a fox*. I’ve read through my blog (almost 200 posts!) and found all the notes that may be an inspiration before you embark on yet another year-long school adventure. All of the ideas were tested on human beings and all of us not only survived, but had quite a lot of fun.

First class

You may start your course with some listening activities, where you all listen to students’ favourite songs – you may not only assess their listening skills, but also learn something about your new pupils. If you want to start a new course with good vibes, you should go with my lesson on Storytelling (with a lesson plan): a simple lesson on making stories with a little twist.

You can still have some fun outdoors! Get inspired by my three ideas that will make the beginning of your class as pleasant as a summer trip. On the other hand, if the weather is bad, you may simply use one of 7 lifesaving apps and bring some fun to the classroom – as a promise of all the fun you are certainly going to have during the whole course.

If you want to start something new and haven’t yet tried the station-rotation model, I recommend my lesson plan on Dyatlov Pass Incident – it’s brilliant for teens that are on B2 level, as the whole lesson brings new things: new lesson format, fascinating topic and real-life skills on how to organise a debate.

Introduce a project

If you’re feeling lucky (and ambitious), you may start your first classes by introducing self assessment. This is something that can be easily transformed into a year-long project and end up as a lifelong attitude, if your students are brave enough.

It’s good to start your class by boosting students’ motivation – you may introduce nice mobile apps your students may use at home to improve their skills.

If you’re into year-long projects, encourage your students to start their own cookbook! You can a) make them do something useful (a website and some food) b) relax while they share their recipes, c) eat delicious food. When it comes to projects, this is my favourite one. Yay to free food!

And here’s another project that may be either a short one or a long-running thing. The whole thing is about excuses, excuses, excuses… regarding homework. Why didn’t they do their homework – again? Answers may be typical (and boring), but make something good out of this by making your students create stories (more or less believable) which should be noted down and finally used to create a real book.

Change in classroom management

Adopting a testing system is usually quite challenging, both for students and teachers. Why not include a bit of fun there and go fully online? I recommend quizizz, something that made my tests maybe not extremely enjoyable, but at least mildly amusing. Oh, and if you want to give your students a little cheat sheet with all English tenses to revise, you might use mine.

One of the most important things, from my perspective as a student, is information about the lesson goal – I want to know what I am going to learn, which activities I have to complete and what’s the final outcome. The one and only Ewa Torebko wrote a brilliant post about it and honestly, you simply have to read it!

As you can see, there’s quite a lot of ideas to start a new school year with, so you can choose the one you like most and give it a go!

Enjoy!

*do you know who’s the author of this phrase?