Category Archives: Resources

Illustrating your stories: Storybird

Create your own stuff, Resources, Writing skill, , , ,

Has your teacher asked you to write a story ? or Have you asked your students to tell you a story? No matter whether you are a student or a teacher reading this, storybird is a very creative innovative tool which will turn writing tasks into a funny game.

How does it work?

♥Click on “Sign up” in the top right corner to register for an account and  you’ll be sent an email to confirm your registration.

♥Pick up artwork  and start writing your story.

♥The story can be printed out, shared  or read directly from the computer. It can of course be projected on a screen, which is  a  very nice to share what you’ve done.

And this is my storybird! I’m afraid I didn’t have much time to do it either  better or longer !

 

 

Lyreach.com : learning through songs

Audio, Grammar, Listening, Music, Resources, Vocabulary, , , , ,

I can’t imagine life without music but much though I love listening to it when I’m driving, working, relaxing or having fun, you won’t see me bringing music to the classroom just because. There is always a reason to choose the song I ask my students to sing. It could be either because it contains a certain structure we are working with or because of its vocabulary or its phonetics, but there is always a reason
This is why when I bumped into this site lyreach.com I was thrilled as it offers the possibility of typing words or idioms or structures as you might expect to get them in the lyrics. The lyrics of about 470000 songs are stored so the hard part is choosing which of these songs you would like to work with. Then you click on your choice to see the paragraphs that it appeared in, the title of the song and the singer and sometimes a clip from Amazon.com
In this case I was looking for a song containing Adjectives with too and enough and this is what I found.

You might be interested in having a look at these songs:

Using jokes to teach Grammar: ESLjokes.net

Funny Stuff, Grammar, Resources, ,

Why the hell (excuse my enthusiasm) does a lesson have to be boring when you can teach grammar using jokes and unbelievably the only thing you have to do is a click away.
ESLJokes.net offers us ready-made lesson for teachers and for students. The jokes are graded as elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate and upper intermediate/advanced and they cover lots of grammar points from present simple to reported speech.


If you are student, you can use them for autonomous learning because it also provides the answers to the exercises and if you are a teacher, then this is just pure heaven! Everything done for you!
I’m planning to use the one about the Penguin (please, see Intermediate) to teach reported speech and I’m sure my students will be glad to have reported speech introduced in this way. Wouldn’t you if you were a student?

Write a comic with www.writecomics.com

Create your own stuff, Funny Stuff, In the Computer Room, Resources, Writing, , ,


It’s never been easier to write a comic. This fantastic site http://www.writecomics.com/ allows you to create your own comics in just a few minutes and you don’t even need to register.
It’s great to do with your own students in the computer room or, alternatively, set this task as homework. I can almost see my students’ faces lighting up when I tell them.

How to do it:

♥Choose a background by clicking on your choice

♥Choose the people or the animals. You can also add props and/or aliens

♥Then, the speech bubbles, as many as you need

♥Type the text

♥If you change your mind about something, double-click to delete it

♥Add as many scenes as you need

�
The only thing I don’t like about this site is that you cannot save or embed your comic strip, but. you can copy the url or use a screen capture program to take a picture of it and then embed it into your blog.

Some ideas:
To practise tenses
To write role-plays
To make an interview

Ready-made lessons : lessonstream.org

General, Grammar, Resources, Speaking, Vocabulary, Writing skill, , , ,

I have to admit, it’s more like a confession though, that very often I post about some sites that, I am fairly certain, are not very useful  to my students. The reason behind these posts is that by having them published and organised into categories in my blog I make sure they are always handy and never lost to me.
Today’s post is not for you, dear learners(forgive my selfishness), but for us, English teachers.
This site lessonstream.org, is a great site for ready-made lessons. I’ve been following Jamie Keddie ‘s blog   http://www.jamiekeddie.com/ for  while and knew that he was planning to create a new site with new and old- edited material. And Wow! The site is just great and very creative. I love it!
So far there are 44 ready-made lesson you can browse by Language Level, Learner Type, Time, Main Activity ( Dictation: Running Dictation, Dictogloss, Picture Dictation, Speaking, Gap-filling, Collocations, writing…), Language Aims ( adjectives, tenses, passive…)Topic ( Money, school, jokes, love, food..) and Materials