Posts

How to survive a school year when it's only September?
0 Comments
/
I've already survived a back-to-school time before an actual back-to-school madness and I'm still hyped, creative and eager to try new things (I'm quite lucky my new job is full of challenges), so I've decided to share some of my ideas on how to unwind and survive yet another year without sanity loss.

How To Teach for Exams (book review)
When I got a book on proper teaching for exams I read it immediately and I can recommend it to everyone, not only those teachers who start their adventure with exam-oriented classes. Let me share the review of How to Teach for Exams by Sally Burges and Katie Head.

Role-Playing Teaching (Part 10:Why RPGs Rock in the Classroom)
I've just realised I didn't write anything about why RPGs are so cool when it comes to teaching! So here we are, a list of seven main reasons you should take your class into one of the Never-Never worlds.

Edward de Bono "Lateral Thinking" - how to make your life more creative (book review)
A short yet very inspiring book everyone should read is "Lateral Thinking" by Edward de Bono, who created the term lateral thinking, wrote the book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.

7 Free Online Courses in July
Summer break may be a great time to work on our skills and abilities, especially when we know that the new school year is bound to bring changes. This month I've decided to focus on the courses that are quite summerish and light, so you can learn between a morning suntanning session and an afternoon nap, when you sip some chilled white wine while nibbling on sweet cherries...

M-education for beginners
Mobile education, also called m-learning, is perceived by some as a kind of e-learning, yet it can be much more than that. By using smartphones in the class, and allowing – or even encouraging – my students to do the same, I bring some real context to the artificial environment of a classroom. No longer a forbidden fruit, smartphones can be useful, entertaining and... motivating!

500 Activities for the Primary Classroom - when you look for inspirations (book review)
We all know that teaching kids requires not only knowledge and patience, but also wild amounts of ingenuity and creativity - the younger the learner, the more creative the teacher must be! And since I've professionally come back to dealing with young learners and teens, the book I felt like browsing through really carefully addressed the needs of the youngest learners - especially knowing the author.

5 ways to shine at your speaking test
There's always one part of testing English that you hate. Some hate writing, others listening (aye, that would be me), but somehow it's speaking that seems to cause lots of worries. To tell you the truth, I haven't had problems with speaking ever since I came up with some simple steps. I can't claim you'll excel at speaking tests after following my ideas, but I do encourage you to give them a go - maybe they'll work out for you just as they did for me!

Self-assessment: how I introduced it in the classroom and survived
What implementing self-assessment gave me, was something close to all-year long system of formative assessment. The great bonus is that those teens gain the great skill of being able to self-assess their own progress and this is a skill that will be useful in the future, when the memory of the IELTS preparation course is long gone.

Role-Playing Teaching (Part 7: For Those About to Roll)
The following note is a rough translation of the post Erpegi na pierwszy raz. The author, Michał Laskowski, kindly agreed to me translating and sharing his work. It is originally meant for people who are already familiar with RPGs, so I believe you already know enough of theory and it's high time to start playing on your own!
