Back to Basics: Grammar, vocabulary and more...

Working for myself is a great blessing and means I have a lot of freedom to choose my own working schedule, but there are still some weeks when things pile up and it's been one of those weeks! The only respite from a screen has been my pottery classes which I'm still loving. My teacher calls it 'yoga for the hands' and I think that's about right. It's a very mindful process- makes you slow down.

On that note, I'm slowing down for the theme of the newsletter today. I've got some food-for-thought on some of the basics for you, because I think that occasionally, even if you're a bit longer in the teaching tooth, this can be useful.

Grab a beverage of your choice and let's go!

Something old

One of the things that trainees and novice teachers often find tricky is planning lessons so that they fit into the time you have. It's never possible to anticipate everything in a lesson that might make activities go faster or slower but experienced teachers tend to plan less, exploit their material more and have activities up their sleeves in case they run out of material. But what ARE those activities?

In this video, I answer the question:

'What do I do if I run out of material in my lesson'

and give you some practical ideas - some of them you might like to even PLAN to use even if you don't run out of material!

Something new

Moving on, my new video this week asks another important question:

Why you should teach something AGAIN (even if you taught it well the first time)?

This particularly applies to grammatical structures but it's applicable to vocabulary and functional language, too. How many answers can you come up with to this question? I've got three...

Watch to see if we have the same thoughts and do let me know- I love hearing from people and I always answer :)

Something borrowed

Finally, I feel that observing other people's lessons is a brilliant way of adding to your Teacher Toolkit, seeing techniques or activities for you to 'borrow' and get inspired by. Sometimes it can be tricky though, to dig into what's going on and so when I found this YouTube channel recently, I thought it would be a great one to share with you. It's got a variety of lessons, taught by experienced teachers with a trainer watching the video and commenting on it. This example shows a grammar lesson if you're looking for one to start you off!

BTW- if you subscribed to MY YouTube channel last week- THANK YOU! I'm almost at 48K subscribers now... Still chasing that 50K, so if you didn't do it last week- follow this link and hit 'subscribe' for me (please!). All my free material is there- loads of great stuff for you!

OK, that's your lot! I'll see you next Sunday and have a great week,

Best

PS. You can view all my resources for CELTA here and for teachers here.