Here’s a quick fix warmer while you’re waiting for all students to arrive in your online class. I googled ‘conversation starters’ the other day and found this list of questions 225 starter questions on gifts.com. I pasted these questions into… Read More ›

short activities
Timesaver: Quickfire questions
Online learning again… Five weeks in. Need to keep things lively. Starting the lesson with these quickfire questions for my A2 level students. Nothing special, but livens things up while we are waiting for everyone to arrive. Here are the… Read More ›
Wordwall assignments
Yes, another Wordwall post. No, I’m not on commission. It’s just a great tool. I forgot to mention the ‘Set Assignments’ feature in my previous posts. It’s a really useful diagnostic tool. Make your game. Click to share it and… Read More ›
Fluency and fun: Hidden words
Here’s a quick speaking activity for Primary EAL. A good one for Friday afternoon fun. Check out this ‘Hidden Words‘ post on Bored Panda. Is just a load of illustrations with six hidden words in each. Get the students to… Read More ›
Hirameki with young learners (via Emily Bryson)
A very quick post to say thanks to Emily Bryson! She recently shared this interesting post on using the Japanese art of Hirameki as way to teach life skills and encourage creativity. This worked a treat with my 6-year-olds! We… Read More ›
TEFL Games: Answer Smash!
I used this game at the end of class last week. It was just for fun, although I guess you could tweak it to cover certain vocabulary. It involves quick thinking from the students, a bit of randomness and lots… Read More ›
Lesson idea: Kahoot! for capitalisation and punctuation
A few months ago I mentioned word stress games using Kahoot! This app has also come in handy recently for practising punctuation/capitalisation. I just display a sentence with various errors in it– learners judge how many mistakes there are in… Read More ›
Twist on a classic: Harry the Hippo
A nod to TESOLTOOLBOX here… Harry the Hippo is a fun guessing game to use in the class. It can be adapted for practicing various grammar structures. I can’t remember where I first played the game or who taught it… Read More ›
More creative displays and success criteria
We’ve been doing a module on travel. Last week, students wrote about their most memorable trip. Here’s the latest (sunny) display. I need to mount this on some nice coloured card and frame it a bit better, but I was… Read More ›
Highlighting success criteria to young learners
This post explains simple coding you could use to help learners notice key features of a model text. I know this type of stuff is common in primary schools, so I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s just not… Read More ›