A Journey in TEFL

Jan

25

Reported Speech activities, ideas and links

January 25, 2012 | activities, grammar, lesson ideas, lesson plans, reported speech  |  2 Comments

 

 

It is mid-term break now. At the moment I’m enjoying myself reading blogathon posts and doing some preperation for the first week of the school. February will be a hectic month and I have to pre-plan everything.

Reported Speech is the grammar point that we will study  but I want to challenge them with something different, fun and enjoyable so I checked what I’ve collected so far and searched the web and I’ve compiled a list as follows:

REPORTED SPEECH ACTIVITIES

Write  gossips (possibly from a magazine about a popular person) on post-it notes.

Tell students to walk around, listen to their friends, take notes about the gossips they heard and then report it to the class.

Give them some scrap paper

Tell them to write a wh question

A yes-no question

A warning

A request

A statement about an event that happened at the
weekend

A piece of advice, etc

When they finish, tell them to make balls from the papers

Tell them it’s time to play snowball

Allow them to play snowball for some time.

All of them should have a snowball in the end; they open the ball and report the things written on it.

Tell students they are bored in the lesson ;) and will exchange messages secretly from the teacher (something they always do)

Give them situation and tell them that they will exchange messages until you stop them.

Stop them and ask them to report the conversation.

Play Chinese whisper

Tell a statement, ask a question to the first students and tell him he will whisper the message to his friend and the friend will do the same until the last students receives the message but the last students will report the statement or the question. If he does it correctly, he will become the first student. If he can’t he will continue as being the last receiver for one more term.

Skeleton poem

Tell students to write a poem based on a given model that you think is suitable for your learners

Mum says

Dad says

Teacher says

But nobody says

Bring cartoons to the classroom and ask ss to report the dialogues.

Watch any video about an interesting topic.

Tell sts to take notes and then report some of the talk.

An inspirational TED talk or another short video

Tell something about yourself like ‘I was at starbucks with my friends two hours ago’

Student 1 will report it to the class and say something about himself/herself.

Student 2 will report what st 1 has said and tell something about himself /herself

Or

Student 2 will report what you and st 1 have said and adds his/her own

Student 3 will report what you, st 1 st2 have said and adds his/her own

Recently I’ve stumbled upon this blog. Here you will find a very short mingling activity http://icebreakeractivityoftheday.tumblr.com/post/16455813518/post-it-pass-itand after the activity is done, ask students to report what their friends have wrote.

When I searched on the net, I came across with the following links. You may also find them interesting:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/activities/eavesdropping

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/activities/doctors-patients-speaking-activity

http://www.ehow.com/info_8554756_reported-speech-activities.html

http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/grammar-reference/verbs-and-tenses/reported-speech-tips-and-activities/152843.article

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/grammar/reported-speech/

http://esl.about.com/od/readingcomprehensionquiz/a/report_read.htm

Videos and movie clips

An excellent video on B.C  http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/how/how-tell-if-your-boyfriend-slob

Play wheel of fortune http://www.englishw.com/SamplePage3.php

From movie segments to assess grammar goals 3 extracts from 3 fun movies http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com/search/label/reported%20speech

Songs for teaching reported speech

Beatles DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET

Beatles Things We Said Today http://busyteacher.org/2736-reported-speech-with-friends-theme-song.html

A fantastic idea how to revise reported speech with a song http://bfunb1.mixxt.com/networks/files/file.81836

 

 

Jan

18

EVO, Digitalstorytelling4kids and the tool of the week

January 18, 2012 | Digitalstorytelling4kids, EVO sessions, google search stories, ideas, web 2.0 tools  |  Leave a Comment

I took a challenge this month. Yes, it’s EVO time and there are wonderful sessions for every teacher’s needs. As I’m a big fan of using digital tools in the classroom I decided to take the Digital Storytelling for Young Learners. The course is moderated by a dream team, Shelly Terrell, Esra Girgin, Barbara Sakamoto, Özge Karaoglu, Jennifer Verschoor, David Dodgson, Michelle Worgan, and Sabrina De Vita. I’m very busy with lots of so many things these days, but from the very first day I realised how correct my decision was to be at the course.

The course has three working spaces:

  1. The wiki, for assigning tasks and tutorials.
  2. Yahoo group for discussions
  3. Posterous for showcasing participants’ digital stories.

As in all courses, the sessions started with greetings and introductions. The first task was very creative and the digital introductions were great. I learned new tools, saw how others used the ones that I love and use and saw how others used the ones that I didn’t like but seeing them convinced me to go back and try them again.

I discovered Google Search Stories via Esra Girgin’s introduction and I loved it very much.

It is very easy to use:

Just type in your searches and select the kind of results that is most suitable for your story. You add music and send it to YouTube to share it with the world.

I’m planning to use it

  • To introduce a topic
  • As a pre-reading and awareness raising activity before starting to read a short story or a novel

And also I will ask my students to use it

  • To summarise the story they’ve read
  • To introduce a topic

And I’m sure I’ll come up with something else later, but if you do please, tell me.

And you can watch my stories, the 1st one is a poem from our Comenius project reading list by the Nobel winner Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska

 

and an idea how to assign a writing task for my students

 

Jan

12

New Year, New Beginnings

January 12, 2012 | first lesson for the first day of the year, lesson ideas, quotes, wordle  |  4 Comments

 

On Tuesday this week, I had my first lesson of the new year after the Christmas break. I wanted to do a session where the students would reflect and make resolutions.

I had some wordles(I prepared them for another lesson but hadn’t used) with quotes and proverbs on learning, motivation and acieving goals. I put the students in pairs and asked them to unjumble the sentences. I also gave  a post-it note for each pair and told them to write the unjumbled sentences.

While students working I walked and monitored them and help them to work out. Once they finished, I gave them another post-it note to write an explanation of their proverb or quote and finally I gave them another post-it note and told them to find a motto.

When they finished, they read all they’d done to their classmates and we put the wordles with post-it notes on them on the walls. one of the students said how different and colourful a language classroom is fromthe other ones.

 

 

Then in the second phase of the lesson I told them to create their ‘New Year, New Beginnings‘ posters.

I told them to include the followings on their poster:

  • best year in their life (explaining what made that year special)
  • important events/moments of 2011 (for them)
  • lessons learned in 2011
  • regrets (if there are any)
  • New Year’s resolutions
  • expectations

 

Jan

4

SOME FINE COLLABORATIVE WRITING TOOLS

January 4, 2012 | web 2.0 tools, writing  |  3 Comments

 

Nowadays I’m in need of a good collaborative writing tool and while searching I’ve come across with these goodies. Have a look, you will like some of them.

StudentPublishing.com I liked the tool as it allows students to draw pictures, upload from desktop and create and publish their stories. You will also find lesson plans, useful links for teaching writing, worksheets and a good tutorial how to use the tool.

Writeboard.com is an easy-to-use collaborative writing tool. Create your whiteboard, write your text then invite others to add content to what you’ve started or ask others to edit what you’ve written. I think it is great for online collaborative projects.

TitanPad lets people work on one text at the same time. It works well with online writing projects.

Sync.in is another web based real-time collaborative tool which will work well for class project, writing stories and online projects.

If you have used another tool and think worked well with your classes, I’ll be glad to add them here.

Dec

25

Me, Myself and Teaching

December 25, 2011 | reflections  |  3 Comments

It’s that time of the year again….. Time for feedback, time for resolutions….

Here I go!

What happened to me last year?

Oh how much I owe to twitter and my PLN, I really can’t express that.

Last year’s number 1 event was my blogathon experience. I couldn’t win the GOLD but I was lucky to go to Brighton as the 1st runner-up. This also enabled me to become real life friends with British Council Turkey team and the gold winner, Karin Tiraşin. The whole event was great, meeting my PLN, attending sessions, British Council trainers and their friendship and new friends. I enjoyed the whole event so much that I decided to be back in 2012 and I’m so happy that my proposal has been accepted and I’ll present in Glasgow 2012 and to my surprise me and Karin will take part in the same symposium on technology with teens. Life is full of surprises and makes our ways meet again and again.

Another biggest event of last year was ISTEK ELT, where I happened to present twice because I was in the wrong room with some participants on the actual day, wheras some other participants waited me in the right room and Burcu and her team were very kind  to arrange to repeat the session for the ones in the right room again. ThenI managed to present to a full room participants where Petra (@TEFLPet) was there to support me.

Last year finally we managed to find partners for a Comenius project and in July, I learned that we were accepted. After months-long email writing, we finally met in November in Romania. The whole trip was a great learning and sharing event. I love my Comenius team very much and till the end of the project, I’ll keep posting about our progress.

And Last week I was in Antalya. I was invited there by Turkish National Support Service of eTwinning to present my eTwinning projects.  40 successful teachers  from all around Turkey were invited there as well and we were rewarded because of our work and received netbooks as our prizes.  During, before and after the workshops we had chance to share our experiences and we spent a great 4-day, learning from each other.

My students who graduated from high school can become my Facebook and twitter friends, in this way we keep in touch. Sometimes we even come together for a coffee or a little chat. They visit us at school and give some feedback on how their learning at highschool helped them to be successful at university. Two students visited us recently and told that how our web 2.0 projects were useful for them and how their instructors praised them another one just told me how she was accepted to the MA programme after a successful interview. However, this year’s surprise was from a student studying American Culture and Literature at Istanbul University. She came to school on a Friday and said she wanted to give me a book as a present and opening her bag, she handed me a very thick novel, a romance and when she saw my expression, she told me to open and see what’s in it. There, her name was written as the translator. I was close to tears and I feel very proud of her.

Isn’t teaching the most rewarding, satisfactory occupations? Sometimes you get tired of motivating yourself but out of the blue you find people who see what you have been doing and praise your work. I hope all my dedicated colleagues get this support when they need in 2012.

Happy Holidays to all of you :)

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