Creative Teacherette

Dear all, thank you once again so much for reading my blog and a special thanks to those who entered the giveaway. So here are the winners: GRAND PRIZE  SnippettingOne'sWayThroughTheCraft  1st ISSUE OF VIEW MAGAZINE  StoryTeller Martina Valenčak Bryce Maximus Stana Pavić Congratulations to all ! I would like you to send your addresses to my e-mail so that we can ship the prizes.  I apologize for not being very active this past few weeks, I had some things to take care of, but I'll be back full time from my following post on.

Dear all,  In order to say thank you for visiting my blog, I decided to do my first giveaway. I’m really grateful for each and every one of you from all over the world, and I hope that this blog does help you and give you at least a bit of inspiration to be the most creative teachers you can be. The first part of the grand prize for this giveaway is a GRADED READERS book. For those of you who are new to this you can get more information about what graded readers are here . These are great for your classes because you can use them as obligatory readings, do different projects with them, use just parts of them in your classes or just make your students aware of the fact that there are many books they can read in English, even if they have just started learning it.  There are many different publishers of graded readers, but the one I’m giving to you this time is from Oxford Bookworms Club – Silver Edition (Stages 2 and 3)    It includes the ...

I’m not really a good writer, especially when it comes to creative writing, so it’s no surprise that I hated the lessons in which we had to come up with and write a story or something similar. Free writing is a method that can help your students deal with similar feelings and practice creative writing.  Students are asked to write about something for 5 minutes without break, without thinking about the process, no grammar awareness is needed and it is not graded. They choose whether they are ready to share the written with the others after the 5 minutes have passed.  So the rules are: you continue your writing before the time is up you do not evaluate the quality of the text itself, but just the ideas you ignore the spelling rules after 5 minutes give them one more minute to finish, because good ideas come under pressure At first it might be difficult to write about anything, so you could give them a topic, as simple as “a c...

A few days ago I found this handout with words for different types of people that can be great for vocabulary enriching. Your students should use a dictionary to find what the unfamiliar words mean and then use the words in sentences. Best thing would be if they could connect the words to themselves, which is one of the most common affective strategies.  Tell them to use a word that begins with the capital letter of their names as follows: “I’m Anna and I’m an assessor.” The rest of the class should describe what an assessor is using a sentence: “Anna is a person, who…” It could also be done the other way around – a student describes him-/herself and then the rest of the class has to guess the word. This can be done in groups and in pairs.  You can find the key to the handout here . Do you use affective strategies when teaching? Does it work?

I’ve always wondered how it is possible to teach someone something from scratch, especially when it comes to grammar and learners who are just starting with a new foreign language. It can be really difficult to explain certain grammar structures without using meta-language, but that’s exactly what can happen if you are teaching young learners or someone who has no idea what an infinitive is, let alone tense or aspect. It’s even more difficult when there are some language structures that do not appear in their mother tongue and then you really have to give your best to make it understandable and as concrete as possible.  Imperative can be tricky, but if you introduce some culture and make it fun, your students might just come around eventually. There is a beautiful poem written by W. H. Auden called “Funeral Blues” , which you can use to introduce the imperative. Tell your students to read the poem and circle all the verbs. Afterwards ask the students to whom the au...

To apologize for being inactive for the last 4 days, today I decided to give you the whole lesson plan on one of my favorite books of all time - Jonathan Livingston Seagull . This is a lesson plan for 90 minutes, which is a double class in Croatia. It deals with literature and uses different methods and activities to work this story by Richard Bach. "Dicing" was the first method I presented, and you can read all about it here .  I also used " Literary Circles ", which was presented here .  Then there is a method called " Save the Last Word for Me ", which is very useful for shy and silent students. While reading a paragraph, students are asked to find one or more quotations they consider quite interesting and comment worthy, each student writes their own quotation on a piece of paper (they should not forget the page number) and send it to the others to comment . On the other side of the paper the other students (in a row) write their ...