Nice time saver to help you revise vocabulary or to spice up my lessons. ! In ESL Flashcards all the flashcards come in colour and in three different sizes ( one flashcard per page, two per page or nine per page ) and… they are free! Currently there are 968 total images and 2904 total flashcards. Enjoy this great resource!
This site is plain fun ! Acapela .tv is a new site that has a lot of potential for the language class.
Choose a real character or a cute cartoon and make him speak. Choose from a range of voices that interpret and read content with meaning and emotion. This text to speech tool is great to do dictations or revise vocabulary among other things.
HOW I’M PLANNING TO USE IT
♥I think it might be funny to divide the class into two groups -the class I have in mind, right now , is a small class of nine students; with larger classes I might need to divide it into three or four groups.
My aim with this activity will be to make sure students revise some vocabulary related to money for their next test. So, the class is divided into two groups. They need to listen to their cartoon speaking, write down the words the character asks them to revise and be able to explain them to the other group. Each character will say the same number of words and you know the rest… don’t you?? A competition , as usual, something that I , a very competitive person, just love.
A nice memory of a former student from Denmark , Patrick, who helped me teach English . Hope you like it, Patrick!
♥My next step will be asking selected students from different courses to do the job. The volunteers will need to go home , register and create a character to revise vocabulary . Obviously, they’ll need to copy the link provided and send it to me so that I can display it when playing the game in class.
What do you think? Will they like it?
I have discovered this amazing site to work with slides that I cannot wait to share with you. It is just amazing the variety it offers to create slides , choosing from a variety of skins, borders, glitters , backgrounds…etc. The only thing you need to do is upload your pictures and have fun. It is also possible, as you have probably noticed 
to embed your slides.
How am I going to use it in my classes? Nothing to write home about really; my students are working with TV programmes so I thought to find images from different Spanish programmes and do some speaking. The instructions are in the form of a slide too, so that they can do this exercise at home again and do some more practice before exams.
By the way, the site is called PictureTrail.
Whether you are a fan of this kind of programmes or not, nobody can deny this talent
show has been a big success worldwide. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about The Voice is a singing competition that consists of a blind audition where four coaches (famous singers ) select the members of their teams, a battle phase and then the final, where the audience selects The Voice . It started in The Netherlands like two years ago and since then the format has been sold to many countries where it has also been a big success.
The idea for this activity came from the French teacher in my high school, Yolanda (see picture). Just by chance she commented on how much fun their students had just had doing this activity and right away I asked her to borrow her idea for my English class.
The instructions are fairly simple.
♥Students in pairs and with their backs to the whiteboard listen to someone singing but they won’t be able to see them, that’s why it’s called Blind Auditions.
♥Working with a partner , they decide what the person they are listening to looks like (see handout).
♥When the audition finishes and without turning their backs, they need to decide whether they want this person in their team to be THE VOICE. If they want them, they should raise their hand making the V gesture and saying I WANT YOU!
♥Now, they’ll have to compete against the other students who also want the singer. The singer will belong to the team who has the most accurate physical description of the singer.
I have selected these two videos.If you don’t like the game, at least enjoy the music!!
Oh My goodness! This first week has been hectic in the high school and by Friday it had taken its toll on me ; I was worn out and I sort of needed to unwind . Can you think of a better way than going to the concert the great Gloria Gaynor gave in Oviedo and dancing to the rhythm of her hit I Will Survive? (fits like a glove 
, it was just what I needed ! Enjoy!
And now, to more down to earth issues. I wanted to show you an exercise I’m going to do with my second-year students you might find helpful . If so, feel free to use it.
The aim is for students to use the vocabulary studied for Physical Description.
Preparation: Pictures of well-known people: celebrities, politicians,singers…
Procedure: Divide students into pairs . One of them faces the board and the other one sits with his back to the board. Display the picture of the famous person and ask the student facing the board to describe this person to his partner.
Some rules for the game: students must start by giving a physical description of the person and only then can they move on to give more information about this person. The student guessing can ask as many questions as he wants. I’m planning of setting a time limit for each picure; maybe 1m or 1.30m. Needless to say, only English is allowed.
This is my choice of pictures
Picture Description on PhotoPeach
Yeahhh! Ok ! Sometimes students deserve a treat! It’s the end of the course and most of them have studied pretty hard for their exams and it’s only fair that you reward them with a class in the computer room playing games!
GAMES??? before you start thinking I’ve gone mad allowing teenegers to play games , iiiin the computer room and iiiiiiin the English class , let me tell you that the games are reasonably inside the scope of what even parents would agree with being academic stuff.
The site is called eslgamesworld.com and ,even I ,would be returning from time to time to play the games and have fun.
You can choose Grammar Games, Games for ESL Classroon Teaching ( you can play here The Wheel of Fortune, Who wants to be a Millionaire …etc),Vocabulary Games and Pronunciation Games.take your pick!
Aren’t you dying to try these games?
I’m sorry I haven’t posted for some days now but I’m up to my eyes . Preparing and marking exams takes up most of my free time.June is chaos!
I imagine you have plenty of ideas when half the class is taking an exam and the others ,sort of have already passed all the tests,but here’s another one in case you’re running short of them.
I have taken my students to the computer room and let them roam a bit about this website. English Media Lab offers Grammar, Vocabulary , Pronunciation , Videos and Games for different levels , though I have only used the Elementary Level. They have all loved the Memory Games revising Vocabulary and they’ve made me promise to take them to the computer room once again before the course ends.
The website is a bit confusing because it has a lot of things and it might sometime take you outside their own website. I don’t really mind as long as the new website has what I’m looking for. Anyway , have a look at it and tell me what you think!
Being a full time teacher doesn’t mean that I’m not also a full time mum. 
I am! Trust me! When I get home from a school packed with teenagers I go home to more teenagers, my own children. They take up most of my free time. I help them with their homework, cheer them up when they have had a problem at school, cool them down when necessary, take them to their different after school activities - none of them in the same place where I live… and a long etc.Have I ever mentioned that I also try to teach them some English?
This means that I don’t enjoy as much free time as I did when I worked in the afternoons/evenings in the EOI , so I ‘ve had to look for timesavers and these are , in my opinion, the best online.
BusyTeachers.org is an amazing site offering about 6,300 worksheets divided into skills: grammar, pronunciation, listening, writing, reading, vocabulary. ..etc. . You can also find ppt presentations to illustrate what you are teaching. It’s free and you only need to register to download the files.
ISL Collective is probably my favourite because of the 
quality of the worksheets. Teachers from all around the globe contribute by uploading their own home-made materials. It is 100% free and you only need to register. Teachers and students of German, French , Portuguese , Russian and Spanish will also find lots of worksheets.
Give them a go and let me know if you know any other great timesavers!
We are almost on holidays and students are beginning to feel the heavy burden of passing all their exams. It’s never too late to start studying, is it?
English spelling is difficult. There is no point in pretending otherwise but… nevertheless, students have to learn to spell so let’s choose a motivating activity to speed up their learning.
I plan to take my students to the computers room and use the excellent website Vocabulary and Spelling City.com.
Aim: to revise the spelling of words and practise their pronunciation.
Procedure:
♥Assign a computer to every student (or alternatively to every two students)
♥Tell them they are going to help their classmates revise the spelling of some of the words studied in this course. Decide on the numbers of words you want to revise and ask students to go to the website Vocabulary and Spelling City.com
♥Students type the words in the spaces provided and click on the button Spelling Test. .See pictures below.
♥Ask students to stand up and choose a different computer. Students click on Say It and Sentence to guess the hidden word and type it. Click Check me to see your score and then there is the possibility of clicking on the button Teach me where the word will be spelled.
♥You can ask them to repeat the procedure and revise new words. They will surely love it.
If you want to read a bit more about English Spelling, click here
You might also want to read:
I can’t imagine life without music but much though I love listening to it when I’m driving, working, relaxing or having fun , you won’t see me bringing music to the classroom just because. There is always a reason to choose the song I ask my students to sing. It could be either because it contains a certain structure we are working with or because of its vocabulary or its phonetics, but there is always a reason
This is why when I bumped into this site lyreach.com I was thrilled as it offers the possibility of typing words or idioms or structures as you might 
expect to get them in the lyrics. The lyrics of about 470000 songs are stored so the hard part is choosing which of these songs you would like to work with.Then you click on your choice to see the paragraphs that it appeared in , the title of the song and the singer and sometimes a clip from Amazon.com
In this case I was looking for a song containing Adjectives with too and enough and this is what I found.
You might be interested in having a look at these songs:
