Five Interactive Activities to Debrief a Text
Reading is an excellent way for students to grow their language skills. Having just the right activity to help students access the text on an even deeper level can not only expand your students’ learning but also create engagement and make learning fun. Check out these five activities to help you do this.
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Building Blocks – A lesson in Active Learning
Start your class off on the right foot with this community building activity that doubles as a lesson in how to be a successful language learner.
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CATESOL Reflections Part 2: Tech
Check out this list of interesting websites/apps I heard about at the CATESOL conference.
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CATESOL Conference Reflections: Part I
The annual CATESOL conference is a professional development event for ESL educators in California and Nevada. I attended this weekend and will summarize some tidbits I learned about critical thinking and also vocabulary strategies.
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Participation Stations
This activity structure is a great way to get all students in your class engaged and working, even the shy ones. I piloted it in my class today, and my students enjoyed it. I used it for a post-reading activity, but it could also work well for other topics as well.
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A Lesson on Topic Sentences
If you teach a class where writing is a focus, then you’ll most likely be covering topic sentences at some point. This post has a slide presentation that can help you introduce and your students learn all about writing clear topic sentences.
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Book Group Roles
Group work is a wonderful way to get students to collaborate and learn together. The best way to assure that everyone actively participates is to assign everyone in the group a specific task to be responsible for. If you put your students into book groups, check out these roles.
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Vocabulary Knowledge Share
Here’s an activity to help you introduce a new topic and get students to grow their vocabulary on it. It will get your students to activate their own schema about the topic and then share what they know with their classmates, helping everyone to expand their knowledge.
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Save Time with a Master Google Slide Template
Do you use Google Slides to create your lesson plans? If so, you should definitely have a Google Slide document where you keep templates of slides you really like and want to use again. It will cut down on your prep time.
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Collaborative Knowledge Base with Google Sheets
Yesterday at my college’s convocation, we did a group discussion activity that had us using Google Sheets as a place …
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Poster Presentations: A Scaffold to Public Speaking
Speaking is an essential part of learning a language, and public speaking is a needed skill in school and life. Check out this poster presentation format to help scaffold academic presentations skills for your students.
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Annotating Together: An Activity for Building Reading Strategies
Do you have students who are hesitant to write on a text? Use this classroom activity to help emphasize the importance of annotating while reading and help students build a repertoire of annotation strategies.
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The Parking Lot: A Place for Untimely Questions
As teachers, we need to stay on task for the sake of the whole class while still making sure all of our students feel that they’re heard and their questions, unrelated as they may be, are important. Check out this simple, yet effective, way to put unrelated questions on hold without forgetting them.
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Student Feedback Form: Class Norm
Getting feedback from our students during the semester is very helpful. It also gives students a chance to express their feelings or possible concerns about a class. Check out this idea for an open form where students can submit feedback anytime they feel the need.
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A Dinner Party: Creative Analysis Activity
Help your students build analysis of multiple sources with this engaging activity that uses art to help students draw connections between multiple readings.
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The Accelerated Instructional Cycle
The accelerated instructional cycle is a way to approach an integrated reading and writing course to help students gain a deep understanding of texts and work to write complex and rich writing assignments.
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Learning is Confusion Figured Out
How can we design ESL curriculum that is relevant and engaging to students? Check out this post for some ideas.
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5 Collaborative Class Routines
Are you looking for some engaging ways to get your ESL students to work collaboratively? Check out these five ways to get students working and talking together.
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Creative Reading Responses
Engage your class with these great idea for using various genres as reading responses.
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Three Strategies to Improve Student Writing
Learn about three valuable writing tools you can use to help students improve their writing and overall reflection and metacognition skills.
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