Tag Archives: grammar
Paraphrasing activities & resources
Practising paraphrasing is so important for our students: it requires them to know vocabulary and to manipulate structures successfully. Doing it in pairs or groups means they have to be explicit about the process, further advancing their confidence and control. If you can name it, you can tame it! It is of course a skill […]
Gallery Grammar Goals
My IELTS students are definitely getting to grips with the writing tasks for IELTS, but Grammatical Resource and Accuracy is one criterion they often score low in. The marking codes I use most often with this group are s-v (subject-verb agreement), T (tense), p (punctuation) and s. or pl. (singular or plural). The reasons for […]
Fortune teller revision activity
This lesson idea can be used with kids* to revise 3 sets of vocabulary, spelling and grammatical structures. It’s a fun task, they get to make something and then play with it afterwards. Stealth learning! First,get the students to think about the vocabulary you want them to use. A board race is a good idea because then you […]
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 […]
A free resource to help teach ‘going to’
This is the first post I’ve written in a little while – it’s been Easter holiday time! Before the Easter break, a colleague and I were due to teach our 10-11 year olds ‘going to’. We wanted a fun way to introduce it, and happened on this little beauty from online stopwatch [go to Classroom Timers and scroll all the way […]
Defining relative clauses
This is a communicative, personalised activity for introducing defining relative clauses. Ask your students to write the numbers 1-8 on their paper. Next to no. 1 tell them to write down a place where they like to eat. They should write the name only. You are going to read out 7 similar categories and they […]
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 […]
Stop/try/remember to say “banana”
Verb patterns can often be confusing for students and some verbs like stop, try and remember are even more so, given that the meaning of the verb changes depending on whether it’s followed by the gerund or the infinitive. I developed this activity for my FCE students to practise using the different meanings after I […]
Me too!
This is a great speaking activity that can be used as a warmer or as a short speaking activity to practise a grammar point or some vocabulary or anything. I got it from colleague in a sharing session after the ACEIA conference, where it was one of the activities presented by Teresa Bestwick (see her […]
Pelmanism for paraphrasing
This activity combines paraphrasing skills with a children’s memory game and can help students practise Sentence Transformation exercises the likes of which appear in the Cambridge exams. It takes a bit of preparation but it’s worth it (and you can reuse it). It appears in my resources thanks to Louisa Cristo who shared it at […]
A Hive of Activities 