One of the biggest challenges teaching where I work is the huge difference in ability of the students I teach. It is not unusual for me to have in one class a few students who are almost fluent and at the same time students who slog away and who, despite their hard work (and mine), […]
One activity which I used to do a lot when I first started teaching was getting my class to plan an essay together and then asking small groups of students to write up one of the points onto an acetate so that we could look at the whole essay together on the OHP. I […]
My students loved this video (although it is a bit tricky to understand in places). We used it to stimulate a discussion about how social media can be beneficial to the elderly.
I suspect that most of you, like me, are thinking about what you can do after Easter to get your AS students ready for the exams. Last year I got my AS group doing translations on the 12 prescribed topics to help them revise the vocab and grammar at the same time and I think […]
With the AS exams just around the corner (gulp) I have just produced a verb tense revision activity to be used at the end of my lessons over the next few weeks. I have used my favourite IWB tool ‘Triptico’ to create a list of common verbs (both regular and irregular) to be used alongside […]
A colleague went on a conference last week and one of the ideas she came back with was a pass-the-parcel style activity involving students having to write their own exam style questions and their peers having to answer them. On a piece of scrap A4 paper each student writes down a question for somebody else […]
We always try to make lessons as engaging as we can for students with interactive starters, plenaries and collaborative working wherever possible, but sometimes, for reasons often beyond our control, it isn’t possible to prepare the lessons we would like to deliver in an ideal world. Last week I had planned a lesson with my […]
I’ve just added a new resource to the AS page which is a questionnaire which students can devise to get them to think about the qualities of a good friend. When I have used this in the past students haven always enjoyed doing it, and it always ends up taking a lot longer than I […]
Last week I asked my AS students what things they particularly enjoyed from the lessons and a few of them mentioned the YouTube clips which we watched in lessons. This was actually a bit of a surprise to me as quite often I had just put on the clips to kill a bit of time […]
If like me you prefer not to base your teaching on one particular textbook, and thus are always on the lookout for good resources, it might be worth having a look at the past papers available from other exam boards. It might sound obvious but I mentioned this to some colleagues recently and none of […]