Category Archives: General

Teachers being taught!

Games, General, Students' Corner, ,

I’m still at the high school. I can’t complain. It has been my own decision and nobody said it was going to be an easy path to walk . Teaching highly motivated adults is very easy, there is no argument here! But teens, oh my goodness!
Lack of motivation in some rural areas has been an ongoing problem for some time and this big crisis is not helping much.

On the other hand, I find it really challenging to find new ways to motivate my unmotivated and/or under motivated students. That’s why when I suggested they try and be teachers for one day designing some strategies to revise the grammar for the Present Tense and two of my students showed a tiny bit of enthusiasm I readily encouraged them. Sadly, one of them didn’t come up to my expectations, so it’s not worth mentioning but one of my students ,Eva, did really well. She revised the present tense, she wrote some exercises for her classmates to practise and she even made us play TIC TAC TOE, which we had been using for Frequency Adverbs and Interrogative Pronouns. This is a picture of Eva below. Well done, Eva ! Teaching is in your genes!


 

The difference between the UK, England and Great Britain

General

I’m afraid very few students can tell the difference between the UK, England and Great Britain. For them , it’s always and only England and even though we try and teach them the difference  and at  first they seem quite happy to have finally grasped it ,sadly  if you ask them one month later, they will always turn to the archi-famous and useful  England. Who cares about annoying a bunch of Scottish people?

I have played this video to teach my elementary students. I hope it is helpful to somebody

Hands in my pockets: Alanis Morissette

General, Music

Still on the subject of teaching, over and over again , personality adjectives to my students I bumped into a post where this song was suggested for the teaching of these adjectives.

This is the handout  from this song I’m going to give my intermediate  students. It contains a bit of everything: working with opposites, phonetics and open questions.

Hope you enjoy the song! handout , HERE

A new blog: Using the Ipad in Education

General

The number of educators using the Ipad in their classes is growing . But do we  know how to get the best out of it? To be honest, I don’t. I mainly use it to read , surf the Internet, listen to music and a bunch of other trivial things .That’s why I have thought to bring your attention to this new blog that,  though written in Spanish ,I’m sure it’s worth having a look at. It is written by a friend of mine  who , apart from teaching English ,is a computer geek . His blog is only two months old   but he has already written 17 very interesting chapters.I highly recommend it ! Give it a go here http://blog.educastur.es/nachovilas/