Creative Teacherette

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 ...

No, this post won't be about Adele's song, but about an activity that can not only make your students practice listening and speaking, but also learn a lot about communication. This is an activity for the whole class and it's great to use if you have some behavioral problems within your students. If they are in their teenage years, there will certainly be many ups and downs between them, especially if you take into account that rumors can sometimes make a person's life unbearable. When doing this activity you can show them how a rumor starts, while they practice their speaking and listening skills. You should ask at least 4-5 of your students to volunteer for the activity and tell them to step outside the classroom for a few minutes. They should wait in front of the door until you call them in, one by one. Tell them not to eavesdrop on what is going on in the classroom, as that will ruin the purpose of the activity.  When they are out of the classroom, yo...

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 ...

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 . ...