Christmas Craft Ideas!

Do you want to make Christmas craft with your students and children but don't know where to start?
You can go to http://www.enchantedlearning.com for more Christmas crafty ideas!

Christmas Vocabulary Lesson Plan

Let the holiday spirits go to your students! Come download this Christmas Vocabulary Lesson Plan which includes the following vocabulary:

Christmas  聖誕節

Christmas carol  聖誕歌曲

Jesus Christ   耶穌基督

wreath   花環

decoration  裝飾

tinsel 金屬絲

Santa Claus  聖誕老人

chimney 煙囪

reindeer  馴鹿

mistletoe 檞寄生

Christmas Vocabulary Lesson Plan

Individual or group?

I often found myself battling in class about whether I should group my students and have them learn together or ask them learn individually. There are pros and cons for both approaches. As teachers, we need to fully understand the possible scenarios before we make out minds.

Pros on groupwork:
1. It increase the numbers of talking opportunities for individual students.
2. With more ideas and opinions, it would create a more complete learning experience.
3. It encourages boarder skills of cooperation and negotiation , and more private than work in front of the whole class. (See Lynne Flowerdew for more information)
4.It promotes students' self confidence and encourage them to develop their own rules.

Cons on groupwork:
1. It is likely to be noisy and possibly lost control.
2.Not all students enjoy it since some might prefer or require more attention from the teacher.
3. There are some students in the group would assume the dominate roles and cause others to lose their voice.
4.Groups requires longer time to set up in the beginning and wrap up in the end especially if all the students have to move around in the classroom.

How to choose the right materials for your students?

Hi, everyone! Sorry for the delay. I am currently in America spending some quality time with friends and family. I will try to put in more entry but you know how it is.....it's so hard to stay inside and work when visiting a new city!

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Ever since I start teaching, I often discuss with my school manager about what kind of materials I like or how do the students react to the materials, is it too hard or too easy. Then almost with no exceptions, I always ended up choose the materials for the entire school.

Here are few pointers I look for when choosing the materials:
1. Difficulty:
Usually I would choose the books that the difficulty level suits the whole class. So even the under-performance students could excel if they try hard. However, by doing so, the students who learn faster might get board easily. Therefore, if you decide to choose relatively easier materials, you should always have extra materials at hand for the more advance students to tackle on!

2. Illustration:
Illustration is important especially for beginners who have limited vocabulary. There are many vocabularies that are hard to explain by using language and it is simply if you simply have a picture of it.

3. Practice
I like the textbook, materials that have many exercises and questions to practice with. In my opinion,the only way to mater a  language is through drilling and practices. The advantages of having many practice questions or exercise is that teacher can choose freely whether they want to use it or not. Or even assigned it as homework.

Free Worksheets Website

During my teaching years, I often ran into problems of not having enough materials or the materials which the school provided is simply not good/interesting enough for the kids. When I have these kind of problems, I always try to look up online to find more resources and help. Soon, http://www.learningpage.com/ comes to my attention.

Learningpage is a free website. It is absolutely FREE to sign up for membership in this site. Once you have membership, you get to download a lot of great sample lesson plans, worksheets, and fun stuff. 

There is one time, my school gave me a very small book on space (18 pages) and asked me to teach my first graders about space in 4 months. If i only used that book, my students will eat me alive and be bored to death. So I have to do something. Luckily, they do have lots extra materials in learningpage.com. I use it with my students and they LOVE it. We learn so much more and had a lot of fun with it! They also have topics on ocean animals, zoo animals, dinosaurs, amphibian, spiders, calendar, money, senses,time, and measure. They also has a great variety of alphabet writing and cursive practice sheets.

Other than that, every month they will launch out new worksheets and lesson plans accordingly. Additionally, they provide their member FREE access to their achieve. Long story short, they've got lots of well made stuff and it's worthy to check it out!

Teaching adults or children?

Many teachers often ask me "Which one suits me better? Teach adults or children?"
If you have the some doubt and can't seem to wrap your head around it.  Here are four differences between teaching adults and children for you to ponder on:

1.      Adults are able to use their native language to understand English while children might need further explanations. For example, teaching adult about vocabulary most of the time once the teacher provides them with the corresponded meaning (in student’s native language,) they understand the vocabulary. However, when teaching children, it requires more than corresponded meanings, sometimes teacher has to go further into the details explaining and making examples.

2.      Adult students often ask to be included into materials, teaching style selection process.

3.      “Pride might often interference with learning,” according to my TESOL Tutoring Specialization Manu. Therefore it’s very important to constantly offer encouragement especially to your adult students. Otherwise, adult might easily feel demeaning and lack of confidence.

4.      Children often require more motivation for classes since they might be asked to be in the class. On the other hand, adults are usually more motivate since they usually initiate the class.

Katy Perry's Teenage Dream Lesson Plan

Do you like Katy Perry's song---Teenage Dream? If you do, then you can't miss this conversation lesson plan!

Katy Perry's Teenage Dream Lesson Plan

Good Phonics Material

http://www.dorbooks.com/phonics.html

Good Phonics materials are hard to find. Most of the books out there are inconclusive and sometimes lack of explanations.Then I stumbled  upon "Phonics Pathway"
Phonics Pathways is one of the books that actually have many examples and practices for both  teachers and students. Phonics Pathways not only has the sample sounding/spelling words, also puts them into sentences or poem.

http://www.dorbooks.com/p115.html

As you can see, the format of the book starts with the phonetic sound. Then move onto how to form the sounds together. Last, practice vocabularies and sentences.

I have two classes of students who are the same age and they use the same materials. However, I am only given the freedom to use supplementary materials to one class.
The class which uses Phonics Pathway somehow reads better!
If I have to be really picky about the book, I'd say the book seems to designed more for the teachers than to students. The book is pretty heavy for kids to carry around and it needs to have some written exercises in it.

Teaching or Tutoring?

http://www.inhometutorsnashville.com/tutor-application.htm

Many people have asked me which one is better? Teaching or Tutoring?
It's only a matter of which setting you are more comfortable in.


From my Global TESOL Tutoring English Specialization Course Menu, I learned that the difference between teaching and tutoring is the individualized attention given to the students during tutorials.Therefore “tutoring” means the students will have teacher’s undivided, completed attention during the class whereas during normal classroom setting the students will share teachers’ attention altogether. 


From student's perspective, tutoring lessons are personalized and can concentrated on fulfilling student's needs. However, the cost of private tutoring sometimes might be too steep.


From teacher's perspective, tutoring sometimes means more preparations and works. On the other hand, the financial reward is often higher than teaching. Generally speaking, the English private tutoring rate in Taiwan starts at 800nt/hr (USD 26)and up to 2000nt/hr (USD60)

Grammar Lesson Plan: "if"

http://www.pablosinferno.com/blog/?p=70

Do you need more ideas for teaching grammar?
Come check out my lesson plan !

Grammar Lesson Plan: "if"