If, in the middle of the lesson, your students: Pretend to communicate with their home planet. Make a paper plane and try to get it stuck in an awkward or unreachable place. Start beat boxing. Tell you they are Harry Potters…
Chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken….Would you like to know what this “chicken” is about and help your learners speak more coherently? I’ve described a few (hopefully) useful classroom activities in my new post on the British Council’s Voices blog here. Check…
Testing Hacks for Teachers: Gamified Testing in Low-Resource Classrooms Here’s a secret: we can do more by doing less, and the pain does not necessarily mean the gain. In business, all possible ideas and actions are mapped against two factors:…
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. Robert Frost Poetry is timeless. Poetry is on the timelines. It isn’t the first time the numerous “finest people on Planet Earth” aka English teachers…
One Reddit user recently discovered a miniature world inside an old bottle while cleaning their yard. The long neck of the bottle creates the impression that you’re peering into an amazing world. Image credit: photograph by kidgalaxy on reddit At times,…
Ammon Shea, a 37-year-old former furniture remover in New York, spent 12 months conquering what he describes as the Everest of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), by ploughing through 20 volumes, 21,730 pages and 59 million words (read more here). We…
Have you ever played Mafia? Mafia (also known as Werewolf) is an extremely engaging and fun game that can be used to practise group decision making and communication. The idea of using the game in the classroom is not new (you…
“Nothing worth having comes easily. The enjoyment kicks in when you really start to get it, when you finally meet William Shakespeare on his own turf and his language begins to open new doors in your consciousness”. Joseph Smigelski …
“A bebble from the next torplet came up to the fence around their hucklid and pabt, ‘This is a very swilish tublem’… What do your flimbies say about that?” They smile at you, you smile back. For now, a smile…
This blog post is a summary of the talk Raising Scores: Gamification Activities for Test Preparation Teachers given by Christien Lee, the author of the new Tactics for TOEFL iBT book available from Oxford University Press, at the IATEFL Conference…
