S . ESL Teaching

Time: about 45-60 mins  (notice that the time can be very different according to class size and abilities of the students) Routine: (5mins) Make a circle, have a small soft ball. Pass the ball and ask the child on your right side “What’s your name?" or any other question you want to teach them. The child answers and then passes the ball to the next child and asks the same question and so on. After one round spice it up and take the time the children need to finish one circle (I usually take my cell phone as a stopwatch) and encourage them to be quicker. I usually tell them that another group did one circle in 10 seconds (not true, but they don’t know that, so you change the time according to which results the children had in the first round and take away 1,2,3 seconds), and ask them if they can do better. Intro (5 mins) Have a set of flashcards (or simple construction paper in every color). Hold up the first card and elicit the color....

Every morning, when I open my emails, I get "Today's inspiration" - a newsletter with a tiny quote of the day. Today it came up with a quote that made me think of a discussion I had with a teacher a while ago. The quote is the following: "Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else."  – Judy Garland Now I had this conversation with this first year teacher, who, after 2 months of starting work was on the edge of a burnout already. She sat in front of me and cried for about one hour nonstop. I don't know if she read the quote above or where she got her ideas from, but she thought that everything she is using in order to teach must be from her herself. The games must be from her own head, the flashcards must be made by her own hands and so on. So she literally drew all her flashcards by hand herself. I had asked her many weeks prior to this meeting why on earth she is doing all this? There are tons of things o...