Sticky Grammar! #7: Gender Walls Revisited

In an earlier article on Sticky Grammar (which is more concerned with making grammar stick with learners rather than it being necessarily very complex), I looked at how to use the Gender Walls technique for helping learners of French to keep masculine and feminine nouns distinct in their minds.  Of course this can be used for [...]

I Will Survive! Managing Your Workload As An NQT #3

Surviving the Summer Term At the beginning of this academic year I posted a short article each day in the first week of the autumn term.  These were basically an expanded form of a list of pointers I would give to Newly Qualified Teachers in my department as they were starting off.  It’s very easy [...]

Welcome back… and Happy Holidays!

After a spot of paternity leave following the birth of my beautiful daughter nearly three weeks ago, it’s now time for the Easter holiday!  On the blog this term we’ve looked at ‘Beginnings’ from different perspectives.  In the summer term we’ll take a look at some activities I’ve been having fun with this term and [...]

Word Games & Tiny Twists #3: How do you spell…?

This is one of my favourite games which you can use at all levels and for a range of different purposes.  In a nutshell, you call out words and pupils spell them.  Sounds riveting, doesn’t it?  Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.  The basic questions which underpin any activity on this blog [...]

Word Games & Tiny Twists #2: Word Stairs

For this game, all you need is a write-on whiteboard or visualiser.  Write up dashes across and down the board so that each successive line has an extra dash: Pupils suggest words to fill in the dashes, each word being one letter longer than the previous word.  For a beginner’s class, that can be the [...]