Creative Teacherette

I'm sure you're all familiar with the chain story as a form of writing exercise, but today I'll present a little spin to the activity. You can use this method whenever you want, but let's take an example of dealing with conditional sentences. When practicing conditionals, you should start a sentence with: "If I was a rock star..." and a student should continue the sentence with their own words, e.g. "If I was a rock star, I would be very popular." Then another student should continue like this: "If I was very popular ...". You do this until everyone has said their own sentence.   You can also use some alternatives and here is where Twitter comes in. As you all know, a Twitter message can contain up to 140 signs, so you can tell your students to write their example as long as possible, but no longer than 140 signs. They can do this on paper or really use their Twitter accounts if they have them. Twitter is even better for real chai...

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 _________...

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