Saturday, 31 October 2015

Halloween fun


Halloween is one of those special days young learners love in the English classroom.  Following some of the popular Halloween traditions (coming to the class disguised as zombies, skeletons, witches, spiders etc or playing trick or treat) is always fun for both teachers and students. Decorating the class with Halloween stuff is also another good option. This year I decided to ......excitement by having students  do some crafting while listening to Halloween songs. Below you can see some of our crafts which turned into beautiful decorations.


Halloween treats
















Bat decorations


    
Jack o' Lanterns





http://englishflashgames.blogspot.gr/2010/10/halloween-game.html














Friday, 16 October 2015

Learning the digraphs


This is  a very nice poster I use with junior classes after I have introduced the consonant digraphs /ch/,  /ph/, /sh/, /th/. Students need a lot of practice  in recognizing these letter combinations in the new words they learn and in pronouncing them correctly. What I've done is  divide the poster into five different columns so that I have one column for each consonant digraph.  The students' task is simple. Every time they learn a new word containing the digraphs, they have to write it under the correct column. For example, chair goes under the /ch/ column.
Students just love rushing to the board  to add to the list everytime we come accross a new word  in the book. Discovery raises motivation. However, if you don't want the students moving around continuously, you can ask one of them or a group of them (in case of a large class) to go through the pages you have covered from the book at the end of the lesson and make a list of the words with digraphs. He or she can dictate the words to another student to locate them into the correct column.























A similar poster can be used for vowel digraphs.


P.S  Don't forget to use different colours for different vowel and consonant dipthongs. Colours always help categorization.