Creative Teacherette

I’m sure you all have at least some kind of experience with dictations in the classroom. Most of the time, dictations are considered boring and can get really frustrating for students, especially if they are still learning how to write in their L1. Here is an idea for practicing dictations and making them less painful. Running dictation is a type of dictation in which your students are responsible for it from the start.   They should work in pairs and it goes like this: You should come up with a story that you will write on a piece of paper and hang it onto the wall in your classroom. You can use multiple sheets of paper so that your students don’t collide during the activity. One person from the pair has to "run" to the paper and read and remember as much as possible and come back to their partner as fast as possible and dictate what they have read, while that person writes down the story. In the middle of the “game” you should tell them to swap the roles, so that ...

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 _________...

Here is one more idea for interesting language teaching. Today, we're dealing with music, reading, listening, singing and competition. I made this Power Point Presentation for a class that deals with culture of English speaking countries. I chose 10 songs that were number 1 on January 1st on the Billboard Top 100 in the previous century (every ten years, starting from this year) and made a quiz on that topic. This activity is great for checking reading comprehension in a different way than usual. What you should do is the following:  Divide your students into groups and give each group a handout with a song and its short description . They should read it and make notes and try to remember as much as possible. Then they should make new groups in which there will be one student from each initial group, so that in each new group, every student knows something about one song. They should briefly present their songs to each other and then play the game. You shoul...

One of the courses I'm taking this semester is called Language Learning Styles and Strategies . It is pretty interesting what you can do with different strategies and how they can help you be a better language learner, but during the course I realized that not much emphasis is put on LLS in the formal classroom here in Croatia and I think it's a shame. So, for those of you who think that you can help your learners learn better, faster and more efficient, here is a short project (micro-lesson) that I have to do on Tuesday, which can be a great way to start LLS training. The first thing you want to do with your students is raise their awareness of the fact that there are such things as LLS. How do you do that? You give them different types of questionnaires, do interviews with them, make them write a language learning diary, or comment in retrospective on a specific activity they do while studying; all of this depending on their language proficiency. You can also make a...

I thought I would use some of my own ideas in my first post, but I stumbled across an amazing web site, so I wanted to share it with you. TED-Ed is a sort of a video library that allows its users to take any useful educational video and easily create a customized lesson around the video. It includes videos and lessons for every school subject and since they are all in English, English language teachers can make use of all of them. Users can distribute the lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student. Here is a short website tour:         I love this video lesson on Shakespeare and his words. It deals with certain insults from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and explains them in a funny way. You can use it as a material for some listening activities or as an introduction to a lesson about Shakespeare or his work. It is most suitable for high school students...

Hi, everyone! I decided to start writing this blog to share my ideas for creative and interesting teaching. I am a student of English and German Language and Literature at the University of Osijek, Croatia and I'm currently doing a Master degree in Education, so this will be a great way not only to share my ideas, but also to practice my English skills.  I hope some of the methods that I'll present here will be helpful for some of you and although they will mostly be connected to foreign language teaching, many of them could be used for other school subject as well. Please feel free to give suggestions, comments and your ideas and don't hesitate to ask any questions. Looking forward to see what turns out of this blog! :) Regards, Eva