BE YOUR OWN VALENTINE
This year I’m taking the safest path to discussing love and relationships – the ‘healthy self’ path. As a warm-up, write self-love = selfish on the board, and ask students whether they mean the same thing. Have them come up…
Category vocabulary
RESOLVE, RETRY, REPEAT: RE-WORDS
Every new year starts with a season of resolutions, or re-words. They feel more powerful than hopes because, etymologically speaking, when you make a resolution, you’re not just making a promise, you are already solving a problem by breaking it…
DESCRIBING PERSONALITY: MANY ‘ME’S AND ALL THAT JAZZ
What’s in this post: materials writing, describing oneself with a twist, Poetry Comics, the Many ‘Me’s song, clines, Jazzy Bingo, and other activities for practising personality adjectives Materials writing gets a whole new twist (or an evolution?) with new AI…
DRAWING WITH WORDS…LITERALLY
What’s in this post: The Inner Workbench; the inner eye; the Google AI Studio Challenge; Wordsketcher; and a few hands-on activities for the classroom. Many powerful ideas in language learning get a bit lost in the noise of the ‘C’…
PLAY WORDS. INFINITELY.
What do we need? We need word use examples. We need them current. We need them tailored. We need them now. ‘Artificial’ once meant skilled creation. Did you know? The Ancient Greeks divided knowledge into two types: episteme (the theory,…
CONFESSIONS OF AN IDIOM: VIDEO-BASED SCAVENGER HUNT, IN-VIDEO SEARCH
Confession time. I like to add a personal touch to my presentations by sneaking in an Easter egg – or a couple – hidden surprises. I know they may go unnoticed (and in most cases, they do), but I love…
RIDDLES AND IDIOMS: RIDDLIOMS
Designing multimodal activities for language students Busy? Same here. I was working on a new set of multimodal tasks for assessment, but, as usually happens, I came up with something extra – a new idea to add to my favourite…
CREATIVE ALPHABETS: VIDEO FLASHCARDS AND MORE
With so many new AI-driven tools popping up, it’s easy to get lost. Is it even possible to try all of them? Well, is it even necessary? During a recent CPD session for in-service teachers, I was asked to define…
TextFX: PLAYING WITH WORDS
Have you tried TextFX yet, or Get Inspired If you haven’t given TextFX a try yet, you’re in for a real treat. This isn’t another ‘save time for busy teachers’ tool – it’s more like a creative spark for language…
12 5-MINUTE VOCABULARY REVISION ACTIVITIES
Need to fit vocabulary revision into an hour? Here’s a short post on how to use revision clocks to review any themed vocabulary your students have studied. Resources: A sheet of paper if you have limited classroom resources, or the…
