What's good about teaching on your birthday?

This is what's good about teaching on your birthday.

A few of the students were late coming back from the mid-lesson break and I was ready to lecture them on timekeeping. Then they came back with this completely adorable personalised cake.

All is forgiven, late students.

British Royal Family Tree (free printable worksheet)

This is a printable standalone worksheet that contains all the information learners need to complete the British Royal Family tree.

For the "research project version" with no accompanying text, click here.

Lead in with pictures of members of the British Royal Family, eliciting their names and relationships to one another, and then hand out the worksheet. Students can complete it individually or in pairs.

Follow up with a quiz to revise family words, for example: Who is Prince Harry's aunt? Who is Prince Philip's mother-in-law?

Click here to get the FREE pdf

(Links open in Google docs, no sign-in required, you can then download, save, and print as required.)

No, not, neither, none: revision for intermediate ESL students (free printable worksheet)

By special request from my students I made a revision sheet for no, not, neither, and none.

No, not, neither, none

No means “not any” and is used before nouns.

There is no water on the Moon.

I can’t write.  I have no pencil.

Snakes have no legs.

None means “not one” of a group of things, or “not one part” of a whole thing.

It is a pronoun which can be the subject or object of a sentence.

None of the mangoes looked good enough to eat.

None of the bread was eaten / We ate none of the bread.

It can also be used as a short answer.

Q. How many bananas are left?  A. None.

Neither means “not one” of two things.

I had two projects, but I completed neither of them.

Neither of my parents wear glasses.

Not makes a verb negative.

I do not like dogs.

I have not been to China.

There aren’t any students in the classroom.

My breakfast disaster

Fill the gaps with no, not, none, or neither

One day I got out of bed and went into the kitchen to make breakfast.  I had (1) ____ slept very well, so I wanted to make coffee first.  But when I looked in the cupboard, there was (2) ____ coffee left!  Then I looked for tea, but there was (3) ____ of that either.  So I opened the fridge to look for something to drink, and guess what?  There was (4) _____ milk and (5) _____ juice.  There was (6) ____ even any water.  There were two bananas left, but (7) ______ of them looked good enough to eat.  Who had eaten everything in my fridge?  It was (8) _____ me!  Getting annoyed, I went to the shop near my house but (9) ____ of the staff were there.  Finally I went to a café and ordered banana pancakes and coffee, with (10) ____ milk and (11) ____ sugar, just the way I like it.  Later I told my friends about my terrible morning but (12) ____ of them were interested.

Click here to get the worksheet FREE

Link opens in Google documents and you can then download, print or save as required

Telling tales #1: Adverbs and adjectives

If verbs and nouns are meat and bread, adverbs and adjectives are sauce and pickles. To get my students to spice up their narrative sandwiches I decided to go way back to basics and practice placing adjectives and adverbs. This worksheet could really be adapted for any level by providing more complex sentences and encouraging more sophisticated vocabulary. Sky's the limit!

Start by brainstorming adverbs and adjectives. Students can show you what they already know, and you can take the chance to feed in new words.

Students progress to adding adverbs and adjectives to simple sentences.

Happy sandwich-making!

Click here to get the worksheet FREE
(Links open in Google Docs and you can then download, print, or save as required)

Tips for teaching early morning lessons

My earliest lessons are at 6am. The advantage is that students can fit in a class before school or work, and at least they are not tired from a stressful day at said school or work. However, as you can imagine, both teacher and students can feel a little bleary at that time in the morning and it takes a little time to get the gears oiled. Here are some ways to get the cogs turning at early o'clock.

Gauge the mood
Take the time to ask the students how they are today. Of course this is nice to do at the start of any lesson, but especially important at the start of the day when people can feel a little fragile (or tired, or cold, or hungry...). When you know how the class is feeling, you can judge which kind of approach to take to the lesson and how much encouragement they are going to need. A sleepy class will need more warming up, but if they are already bright-eyed and bushy-tailed they will be happier to jump straight in.

Make some noise
To make sure your learners are awake and have their minds fully in the classroom, do something that will make some noise. I find that a shouting dictation works well: give half the students something to dictate to a partner who is on the other side of the classroom. The classroom will get noisy as the students compete to make themselves heard, so it will get vocal cords warmed up and alleviate some of the early-morning reluctance to speak. Another option is to play some lively music. There are too many uses of music in the classroom to go into here, but for example, you can play an upbeat song and set a straightforward gist task, or simply play some music that sets the scene for the lesson and discuss it afterwards (how does it make you feel? What words or images does it make you think of? etc).

Get moving
Plan kinetic activities that either get the students out of their seats, or get them moving things around. If you have young learners, a few rounds of "change chairs" or Simon Says can do the trick. If you have adults or a more serious class, you can still incorporate kinetic elements into most types of activity. A matching exercise will be more stimulating if students have to find the answers posted around the classroom; an anagram puzzle will be more of a waker-upper if the letters are cut up and have to be manually rearranged. Anything that breaks the students out of sitting still will help.

Inject some colour
A bog-standard, run-of-the-mill black and white photocopy will not get your students woken up. If you have the luxury of a colour printer or copier, use it to make your visual aids more interesting. Alternatively, source colourful images from papers or magazines. Also, simply printing handouts onto brightly-coloured paper will make them more eye-catching and can help to focus attention. You can be nice and use pleasant colours, but obnoxious neon colours also work particularly well.

Passive vs active voice (free printable worksheet)

When I first introduced the passive to my pre-intermediate Cambodian students, their initial reaction was to look at me as if to say, "You're telling me English has another tense? Why, teacher? Why?"

They're definitely warming to it now... I think.

The Oxford textbook that we use tends to jump in at the deep end with grammar points. While the passive may be a breeze for speakers of languages that form it in the same way (eg. French or German), it will understandably take a bit more work for speakers of languages that have no such thing.

To bridge the gap, I made a handout that explains how the passive is formed and what it is used for.

It progresses to some guided practice in the present tense.

Click to get the worksheet FREE

Link opens with Google documents, you can then print or download as required

Present perfect continuous: a no-prep mingle activity

When teaching a grammar point it's important to think "When do I actually use this structure in real life?". The present perfect continuous often appears in ESL textbooks in contrived contexts such as "Why are your eyes red? - I've been crying!"... which honestly I don't think I've ever said in my life.

Being in a new town and a new job, I've found myself having the same conversation over and over. Within a few minutes the conversation generally runs to "I work at the language school - Oh, how long have you been working there?"

Teaching this usage of the present perfect continuous prepares students to have a natural, normal, real-life conversation. What could be better?

Procedure

First, have each student take a small piece of paper and write the following items. Stress: not your own name and workplace but a made-up one.

Name Place of work Small number

Example:

Sopheak Hospital 3

Take the papers in, shuffle and redistribute. Model the conversation:

"Hello, what's your name?"

"My name's..."

"Where do you work?"

"I work at the..."

"How long have you been working there?"

"I've been working there for X years!"

Now the students mingle around the classroom to practice the questions and answers using the cues on their paper. To give a motivation for speaking to everyone, challenge them to find someone who works in the same place as them. Obviously this may or may not happen depending on what the students have written, but they will have to speak to everyone to find out!

Happy mingling!

Do you need to be confident to be a teacher?

I think most people are neither complete introverts nor extroverts, but fit somewhere along the scale and share characteristics with both. I'm typically somewhere in the introvert camp (maybe about 35-40, where 0 is completely introverted and 100 is completely extroverted). It definitely used to hold me back. How can I do X, Y or Z career when I'm not as out-there as everyone else? Luckily I've found that with teaching, confidence is gained with experience, a little introversion actually helps, and techniques can fill in the gaps.

You don't need to have a booming voice.

As long as all the students can hear you, you don't need to have a deafening voice. This will vary according to the size of your classroom and the ambient noise, but normally your speaking voice needn't be a shout. When you need to get the class's attention, shouting can add to the noise and doesn't always help. Use alternative attention-getting techniques such as clapping, shushing, or raising your hand and clicking your fingers.

You don't need to be able to talk for half an hour straight.

In a modern EFL classroom, the teacher is not a lecturer but a facilitator. Yes, some speaking is required, but too much TTT (teacher talk time) is seen as counter-productive. The teacher is not in the spotlight all the time. Your job is to get the students to do as much of the work as possible!

You don't need to know everything in the world.

Students will ask you unexpected questions. Sometimes you won't know the answer off the top of your head and that's fine. There's no shame in having to look something up, and willingness to do some research sets a good example for your students.

Some introversion can be a good thing.

Quiet puts forward that introverts have a longer concentration span and are a more able to work alone than their extroverted counterparts. Teachers certainly need the self-powered perseverance to create a good lesson plan and source materials. I would say that a degree of introversion is actually essential for a teacher.

On the other hand, you do need some people skills.

It's important to be able to empathise with learners and establish a good rapport with them. The learners need to have some respect for you, and this may mean that you have to be assertive at times. Luckily, you can learn techniques to keep control without feeling like you're acting out of character. Ultimately, a gentle personality combined with effective classroom management can create a calm, productive classroom environment.

In all, don't be put off teaching just because you've been labelled as 'shy' by other people. By focussing on the learner and having enthusiasm for what you do, you can be an effective teacher whether you are naturally outgoing or not.

British Royal Family Tree - research project (free printable worksheet)

This is a research-project type worksheet where learners are provided with the family tree template and then use the Internet to fill in the information.

Click here for the standalone version with accompanying text.

Lead in with photos of Royal family members and elicit a small section of the family tree to the board. Then let the learners loose on the computer room, or their smartphones or iPads.

Early finishers can colour in the title or decorate the blank spaces, then display the completed trees on the wall.

Click here to download the FREE pdf.

(Links open in Google Drive and you can then download, save, print, and use as required)

6 tips for teaching elementary English learners

I sometimes think that elementary is the most challenging level to teach because the learners have very little language to work with. But I had a new elementary class today who refreshed my teaching tactics and reminded me that this level can be very rewarding as well. These tips are to remind myself just as much as anyone else :)

1. Grade your language

Bad: "How do you think he might be feeling?"

Better: "How does he feel?"

Bad: "What would you buy if you won the lottery?"

Better: "Imagine: you win the lottery. What do you buy?"

When explaining instructions, be careful not to use language which the learners haven't learnt yet. This means avoiding modals (might, can, should...), the conditional, and all tenses other than the present tense.

2. Practise your board writing

Bad: Unnecessary capital letters, joined-up writing, and writing which slopes down or up the board as it goes along.

Better: Clear text of an adequate size arranged logically on the board. This is especially important for learners whose first language uses a different alphabet - at an elementary level they are just getting to grips with reading English.

3. Be clear when grouping students

Bad: You give all the students a number from 1-3 and ask them to move so that ones sit together, twos sit together, etc. It turns out that some of them weren't listening and just follow their friends so you end up with groups of wildly varying sizes.

Better: Give all the students a number from 1-3 (or however many groups you want) and then say "Who's number one? Who's number two?" while raising your hand. When you can see that the learners have understood which group they are in, then ask them to move.

4. Don't hand out worksheets until the last possible moment

Bad: You give the worksheet to the students before explaining it. Some of them decide to get started straight away and get the wrong idea. Others are so busy reading it that they don't listen to your instructions and you end up explaining five times to individual students.

Better: Hold up the worksheet in front of your chest, explain the task, and check understanding before giving out the worksheets. You can also take this approach when the students have a workbook: just explain the task before giving the page number. This is important for low levels because getting the learners to understand the task can be the hardest part.

5. Use L1 to your advantage

Bad: A student in your class is having trouble understanding an instruction and you can't put it any more simply in English.

What you can do: Unless your class is of completely mixed nationalities, you can allow a stronger student to explain in L1. While it's generally best to have only English in the classroom, this solution is sometimes necessary, especially with lower levels.

6. Gesture, mime, demonstrate... just move your body!

Bad: a sea of blank faces.

Better: At low levels, anything you can do to convey meaning non-linguistically will help your learners understand. If you want them to close their books, mime closing a book. If you want them to put their hands up, put your hand up!