Creative Teacherette

Two days ago as I published the post about Scavenger Hunt I remembered that it could also be used for dictionaries . Most of the students don't really know all the ways in which a dictionary can be used, so doing a Scavenger Hunt activity with it can be very helpful. They usually think that dictionaries are just books in which you can find a translation of a certain word and have no clue about all the synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, variations, multiple meanings, parts of speech a word can belong to, historical connotations and origins, idioms, collocations, etc.  You should just copy a page of your favorite dictionary (monolingual, of course) and ask questions about things that can be found there. This way your students will get to know everything dictionaries can offer. Example of such an activity can be found here . (Keep in mind that this activity is for users who already have some linguistic knowledge.) How do you introduce dictionaries to your students?...

I’m sure you all know how the game Scavenger Hunt works and in this post I’ll give you two suggestions for its use in class. Suggestion 1: You can use this game as a form of reading exercise, where your students practice their skimming and scanning skills. What you have to do is prepare different kinds of texts that you will hang around the classroom + make a worksheet with questions. The answers to the questions are, of course, to be found in the texts. Divide your students into teams and let the fastest one win. Make sure to produce questions for which your students will have to go over the text (i.e. don’t ask questions that can be answered by just looking at the title) and that there are many different types of texts. Tourist brochures from the places you have visited can serve as great materials for this game, especially because they are completely authentic. Some of the reading materials for this activity that I made can be found here + questions here . ...

In this post, I’ll present something very useful for your everyday classroom work. I adapted the materials which were kindly given to me by my friend Anđela, who is just starting out as a teacher of English and German as foreign languages. (Best of luck, my dear friend!) So, what are these materials about? Well, we as language teachers, except from the language knowledge and classroom management have to be able to react quickly and in an appropriate way. If you are teaching only in the foreign language, some of those reactions might not always be the most accurate. There are numerous situations in which our language knowledge shows its real face, so not to say something unfitting or completely wrong, here is a list of possible situations and what you should say when you want to deal with them. There is also a list of useful phrases and sentences, which can be used in classroom and are very often influenced by our first language. Make sure to master these. I know ...

We have finally come to an end with these get-to-know-you activities and the last one I’ll present is the well known “FIND SOMEONE WHO” . What you do is hand out worksheets with some statements to your students. What they should do is mingle around the classroom and find someone who matches the statements given.  When they are all done, they read the statements out loud and name the students who match them.  This can also be a great starting point for some follow-up get-to-know-you activities (maybe even some of those mentioned in my previous posts). You can also ask the students to “prove” their abilities (e.g. if someone can do a French braid, let them do it; or if someone plays a musical instrument – ask them which one, for how long etc.) You can do this with any kind of statements, just be creative and adapt it to your learners’ level.  The important thing, though, is not to give statements which can be matched with a person based on their looks, since th...

Today we continue with get-to-know-you activities. I found a lot of interesting ones on the internet, and this one seems pretty great. It is a game in which there is a mystery factor because students try to find out more about each other by asking questions and giving clues. They work in pairs (make sure they mingle to prevent them from talking to the same people all the time) and I think that the best thing about this game is that they also get to know you – which will probably be the most interesting thing for them. Due to that, this activity is also great to use if you are a new teacher in a class where students already know each other well.  Another possibility is to play a snowball fight. This one is extremely popular with boys, but make sure no one gets hurt. These are the steps: Write 3 very simple sentence prompts on the board. They could look like this: 1. My favorite sport is ______________________________. 2. In my free time I _________...

Hi, everyone! I hope you all had an amazing summer. Mine was great and although I’m still in the mood for just lying around and having no obligations, September is almost here, so let’s get to work. First of all, I would like to inform you that I have created a Facebook page for this blog, where we will be able to share more ideas and you will get notified every time I publish a new blog post, so feel free to like it and participate with your own ideas. Here in Croatia, the school year starts in just two weeks, so I think it’s a natural choice to write a couple of my first post-summer posts about some interesting get-to-know-you activities. You can, of course, adapt each of these to your learners’ age and proficiency level. First up is the so called GOSSIP GAME . In this activity you make your students talk about each other, which is a lot easier than talking about themselves and a lot more interesting for the rest of the class. You should first distribute piec...

Hi, everyone, just wanted to fill you in on what's going on. In a few days I'm heading out to Glasgow to take part in an IP Erasmus Summer School on intercultural communication and I'm very excited about that. This summer break is pretty long, I know, but I can see that there are many of you still visiting my blog and I'm very grateful for that. I promise I won't disappoint you with what's coming up in less than a month. I've set up a Facebook page to accompany this site and it will launch in late August when I come back. That way we'll be able to communicate better and share ideas, so stay tuned for that. There will also be some great giveaways on the blog with products that will be helpful for you as well as for your students, so make sure to come back and take part in those. I hope you're having an amazing summer and I'll talk to you all in late August. :)