Category Original Lesson Plans
Summary Skills Team Activity
Who says summary writing tasks have to be boring? My class don’t love summaries but they did love this lesson. The aims of this lesson were set by my students after filling in the ‘POST’ side of their post-mocks exam wrappers. They wanted to be more confident in identifying the key points in a text, […]
Formal or Informal?
Cut-ups and Kaboom! Students often struggle to distinguish between formal and informal language, and also to produce appropriately formal language when appropriate. Given that academic language is generally formal, and that my students need to be able to write texts of varying registers for their IGCSE E2L, it’s worth some time focusing on the features […]
Developing answers
Do you find your students sometimes struggle to develop their responses to prompts for Speaking exams? I used the “My Place In The World” idea to help students to broaden their thinking. (This could also be used to develop ideas for essays.) First I asked them to consider this question: Why is education important? and […]
Have Something Done – a Lesson plan
I recently applied for the DELTA course, and one of the tasks was to write a B2 level lesson plan for the language point have something done. I’ve always found this one a difficult one to teach, especially with teenagers, because most of the activities I’ve come across in books are about doing up your house which isn’t as […]
Spelling Bee: dictogloss and games
Whilst marking my students’ exams, I was thinking about how often they lose points not for lack of knowledge or comprehension, but due to misspelling the answer. Then I thought about how often we have spelling tests in class: never! So I came up with this lesson about spelling bees involving a dictogloss and spelling […]
New Year’s resolutions + needs analysis
Happy new year! I hope you’ve had a good break. I know I have! Have you made any new year’s resolutions? I’ve vaguely made some, one of which is to spend a bit less time attached to my laptop, so I will be aiming to post weekly rather than daily from now on! Having said […]
All I want for Christmas is… Now with elementary YL version too!
Everyone loves presents. But what’s the one thing you REALLY want? And can you make a good case for it to Santa Claus? This lesson involves some Christmas vocab, open-cloze, listening to a song, pronunciation and speaking and culminates with giving a convincing speech to Santa Claus about the one thing you really want for […]
CPE: Pie Protest – Lesson Plan
I made this lesson for my CPE (proficiency) class and it’s centred on this article about pie-throwing protesters in Northern Spain that I read in The Guardian. The areas of the exam it practises are Speaking part 3, and Reading and Use of English parts 1, 2, and 3. My class really enjoyed talking about […]
CPE: Run For Your Life! – Halloween Lesson Plan
This lesson plan is based on an article from The Guardian called Zombie Games: Run For Your Life. It’s about a 5k run called Zombie Evacuation Race where “zombies” run after you and “soldiers” shout at you. This lesson involves CPE exam style tasks – Speaking parts 1 and 2 and also Reading & Use […]
Halloween Lesson Plan – In The Room Where You Sleep
I’m posting this Halloween lesson before I’ve actually done it in case anyone else might find it useful. It’s a lesson involving a song and some drawing for my two classes of 10-11 year olds. I’ll comment on it after I’ve done it and hopefully have a video to show for it too! First, I’ll […]
A Hive of Activities 