World's Ugliest Animals ESL Lesson

My students had a lot of fun seeing and cringing at the pictures of the world's ugliest animals in this lesson plan. The grammar points are very simple so lower level students should have no problems with understanding the lesson. In the reading activity my low level students seemed quite stunned by the length of the text, but when they took their time to read it they could understand the important bits very easily.

How to Ensure Students Speak During Conversation Activities

Sometimes when you want to do a conversation activity it can be hard to make sure that all the students are using the time given to speak English, and are not in fact talking about their favourite TV shows in their own language. This can be especially difficult in public schools where the students aren't intrinsically motivated to learn English. Here are some ways to make sure the students do their work!

Word of the Year Speaking and Listening ESL Lesson Plan

This is a speaking and listening ESL lesson based on the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year competition. It uses authentic material in the form of a BBC article and video and I have included a PPT and a worksheet that you can use in your class. My students had a lot of fun coming up with meanings for the new words and were actually surprisingly accurate!

Low Level Horror Movie Video Lesson

This is a low level lesson based on this fantastic lesson plan. It was perfect for the week after Halloween but as teenagers love horror movies it would undoubtedly work really well at any time of year. My students could not really understand what the narrator was saying, so I just went through the scenes and asked the students what they thought was happening. Each scene also has a fill in the gaps listening exercise.

Teaching in Korea Guide - EPIK, TaLK, Hagwon.

This is going to be the first post in series about teaching English in Korea. This post will explain the three main routes to teaching in Korea and the positives and negatives about each job. The first thing I will mention is that while these are some general situations that people find themselves in, working conditions can still vary massively between schools, hagwons, co-teachers and education offices. Finally if you have any questions please ask them in the comments section!

Origami ESL Lesson Plan

This is really fun  ESL lesson plan using Origami to get the students speaking. I have just finished using it with my class and I now have an army of really cute Pikachus like the one above, 80 swords, lots of swans and some Mexican sombreros! The students really enjoyed teaching each other how to make things using origami.

ESL Writing and Speaking Game

This is a link to a writing and speaking lesson I used with my higher level class last week. http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/writing-bingo/ The link has a great explanation about the activity, but I will add a couple of things I did slightly differently/ think were important.

Firstly I changed the topic from my vacation to my childhood memory. This was simply because I have recently done a vacation lesson. I added a couple of slightly different questions for the students to answer. I think this activity would work well with any topic.

Secondly I had a worksheet with a space for the students to write in which I told them they had to fill, most students got pretty close to filling it too. This mean that all the students wrote a decent length paragraph.

I wrote a paragraph about my own childhood memory before class and used it to play an example game before the students started. In the classes when I used my example the students all wrote a lot more and seemed more imaginative than the first time I did this lesson, where I just explained the activity to them.

Finally as my class has 20 students it would have taken too long to do each game separately, so I split the students into groups of five and they played the game in their groups. I then asked each groups winner to read out their paragraph to the class.

The activity took up a whole 50 minute lesson.