Archive for the ‘First conditionals’ Category

As people searching for Xmas themed lessons seems to finally be over, here comes the New Year worksheets to ease yourself back into your classes with: (more…)

Don’t know how and when it happened, but no kids’ classes at all this year so had no chance to see their happy and snotty little faces when doing the lessons below, but WiseHat lessons are usually very stimulating for both teacher and students, very occassionally in a slightly odd way! (more…)

In a moment of inspiration fueled by low tolerance to the stimulating effects of real British “builders’ tea”, have come up with:

The pairwork magic formula

I have yet to teach a class that wouldn’t do and enjoy pairwork eventually. If the magic formula below doesn’t work, then you do indeed know to give up on working in groups. The magic formula is:

1. Make sure there are props and a game factor so you and they can easily see if they are doing nothing at all
2. Make sure there is a clear winner, e.g. the person who guesses their partner is lying more often, so that they know if they have completed the task successfully
3. Make sure some of the prompts are written in English, so that there is not a possibility of playing the game just in L1, e.g. cards with the answers they have to elicit from their partners written on
4. Try a simple, repetitive use of a grammatical formbut leave part of the form blank for students to add their own ideas if they wish, such as chain of First Conditionals that they have to try and make finish with the sentence ending they have been given
5. Try to give them preparation time before they start speaking sometimes, e.g. get them to write 5 pieces of information about themselves that their partner has to guess the questions for
6. If it is one or two students in the class that ruin their groups all the time by pausing too long etc, do pairwork activities as two teams of twos instead

*Well, actually it started with a comment of mine on http://insights-into-tefl.blogspot.com/, but that fact for some reason got the “classic” (i.e. horribly dated) Hot Chocolate song “It started with a kiss” stuck in my head and I could only get rid of it through the magical use of a meaningless blog title. Ah, relief…