Archive for the ‘Prepositions’ Category

“Sole Mates” from “The Grammar Activity Book”

Tie words that go together (such as collocations) to different students’ shoelaces. They then walk around putting their feet next to each other to try to match them up. If they make an incorrect pair, they have to take off their shoes and put them in the “lost soles” pile until (at that point I stopped reading…) Also useable (?) for dependant prepositions, verb patterns etc.

This was by far the nuttiest idea in the book, but certainly not the only one that made me go “What??” On the positive side, there are few ideas in the book that you would have seen anywhere else. On the negative side, there are at times very good reasons why no one had written those ideas down…

As mentioned in a comment or two below (and in every other sentence in my real life conversation), I am off on my reasonably well deserved hols from Friday and won’t even be looking at a computer screen for the next 10 days. For those of you who can’t live without an opinionated TEFL rant until I get back, I’m sure there must be something in my 458 posts over the last 14 months that you must have missed, so have a little trawl through the archives here- I’m sure there must be something there to entertain and/ or offend you!

For those of you still here for the serious stuff that I was supposed to have set this blog up for, here are the links to bits and pieces I have been involved in elsewhere in the world on TEFL. The top two are my own particular favourites from the last few months:

15 ways to help your students forget

15 ways to help your students dream in English

15 games for the language of describing people

15 real life situations for the language of describing people

15 typical textbook activities you can personalize

15 difficulties in teaching the language of describing people

15 ways to write a TEFL review

Office vocabulary compound noun stress

Why does my teacher make us work in pairs?

Talking about your job and company first class

Business English prepositions

Present Simple/ Continuous and Tense Review Guessing Game

Complaints prepositions practice

Have got plenty of new worksheets up at Usingenglish.com  , have added a whole bunch of TEFLtasticly multimedia song worksheets for teaching and practising grammar to my video worksheets (more to come of both of these), and have been rearranging the mini reviews on the reviews page so that they are a little easier to find. Have also somehow found time to teach my classes, in fact sometimes it’s a nice break to get away from the computer screen and into class! That is, until I think of another nice worksheet I could type up for the next class…

By the kind of happy coincidence that only happens once in a blog lifetime a reader has mentioned they are looking for some flashcard games (see Ana’s question below), a friend has asked me for some kids’ games for a workshop, and I happen to have all the ideas already written up for a book proposal I wrote a few years ago. The ideas are below, and I’ve also included the book proposal as a page on the right (Book proposal- Kids’ activities for everything) in case anyone wants to write one too- bear in mind that this one was unsuccessful though!

Flashcard and Drilling Games
Introduction
One of the main reasons why parents and education authorities want children to start learning foreign languages early is so they can pick up correct pronunciation while their brains are still young. Especially at the younger ages, correction has little effect and children pick up correct pronunciation as they hear and use the language many times. The problem then is that (more…)