The Importance Of Being a Relaxed Teacher.

Work-life balance has been a buzzword for quite some time now, and I can’t stress enough how important in the teaching profession it is not to work.

If you want to be healthy, efficient, good at your job and happy at the same time, you have to learn to let go. To stop and take a breath.

It is essential for your personal and professional life that you find joy in the work you do. And you can’t enjoy our job if you are permanently stressed and overworked. Your personal life will suffer and afterward, it’s a downward spiral.

How to find the time? Here’s a short list of tips.

1] Prioritise. You can never do all the tasks in one afternoon or evening, you’d be overwhelmed. Chose the most important ones, plan your work, and after you’ve finished them, don’t work.

2] Plan and prepare. Whatever it is, a lesson, a game, your lunch, paperwork, be ready. Prepare before so that you can finish your task effectively. Otherwise, you will improvise too much, panic and lose precious time.

3] Share. If you share your lesson plans and activities with colleagues it is likely they will also share their resources with you. You don’t have to do everything alone.

4] Don’t try to invent the wheel. There are tons of textbooks, grammar books, resource packs, pdfs, lesson plans, videos, apps, podcasts. You don’t have to prepare all your materials from scratch.

5] Delegate. I know many female teachers with families who after they come home from work: cook, clean the house, do the laundry, do the dishes, walk the dog, do the shopping, do homework with their children, etc. I’m sure those of you with older kids could delegate some of these responsibilities to them and be strict about it. Also, I’ve noticed how teachers are considered to have more free time and they are often expected by their partners to do all the housework. Talk to your partner about their expectations and try to find a mutually satisfying solution.

6] Don’t waste your time. Learn to say no and don’t spend time with people who you don’t like. Don’t do things that aren’t important or necessary and which don’t make you feel happy.

Let me know in the comments if you have any other tips how to effectively manage your time.

 

 

Photo by Joe Pizzio on Unsplash

 

 

Holiday Is Over, Back To Work ESL Teacher!

It’s been a while since I posted an article, created a worksheet or did anything even resembling work. Why?

I needed a reboot. I love my work, the creativity of it, the relationships with my students that it brings, BUT, in order to enjoy it all and to be able to create, invent and teach and to be all enthusiastic about it – I need, from time to time – a complete cleansing.

In my case, it means not to work at all and to completely forget that I am a teacher. Not for a weekend, not for a week or even a month. I am lucky that I can relax for 7 weeks.

I read all those mystery novels I’d been putting aside for months, went hiking, rafting, walked around my city, enjoyed coffee in my favorite cafes, went on a couple of day trips with my friend, traveled a bit: Greece, France, Italy. In those countries I explored the seaside, the medieval little villages, galleries, I sampled their delicious food and wines. I had a great time and I didn’t work.

I never work in summer,  I don’t think about work in summer and I don’t talk about work in summer. It is me time and in the end of my little sabbatical, I can’t wait to go back to work!

It is essential for teachers and any other helping professions to find ways how to relax, recharge mentally and physically. You can’t do this job properly unless you learn how to let go. Burnout is a real threat and I believe that only a happy teacher can be an inspirational teacher.

Long break such as I’ve just had is not always an option and finding personal time during the school year is as important as good lesson planning.  I will write more about how to find that time and how to use that time to recharge in my next article.

 

Photo by Leio McLaren on Unsplash.

Vocabulary Posters – Idioms and Collocations.

I have neglected my blog in the past couple of weeks, mostly due to my duties at the school where I teach. Staff meetings, entrance exams, school leaving exams, paperwork…and at the end of the day, no energy for creativity, or even thinking.

Hopefully, I will have more time in the following weeks and then, in the summer! (I plan to write articles and create activities, worksheets and posters during the summer holidays. Well, after a week or two of complete reboot 🙂 )

Until then, enjoy two vocabulary posters, and have fun learning and teaching English!

Meanwhile, have a look at my older articles:   –>>>3 Board Games You Can Use In The Classroom   –>>>ESL Role Play Worksheet: Travel/Holidays    –>>>At The Restaurant: ESL Pair Work and Role Play Lesson    –>>>Media/Entertainment Vocabulary Card Game Based on Taboo   –>>>28 ESL/EFL Conversation Starters to Spark Conversation  —>>> Business English Vocabulary Card Game | Forbidden Words

Bean Boozled in ESL Classroom: A Funny Way to Warm Up, Engage And Motivate Your Students.

Who doesn’t like jelly beans? Most kids love them. Why not use that love for them in your classroom?

I’m sure most of you know the naughty version of Jelly Beans- Bean Boozled. It is a game which features a spin wheel and 14 different flavours of the jelly beans. 7 of the flavours are weird and wild and quite disgusting, especially rotten egg or dog food, others are more or less harmless, like toothpaste and lawn clippings. The other 7 flavours are regular jelly beans: peach, coconut, lime, etc.

The fun thing is, the seven regular flavour look identical to the other seven disgusting flavours. Can you tell them apart? You spin the wheel, which shows you what colour you have to eat. Will it be tasty lime or lawn clippings?

So far, it sounds fun, but what can you do with this game at your ESL/EFL lessons?

Plenty of things. I used it for the first time as an icebreaker in September, during that first lesson when everyone feels awkward and uncomfortable. I prepared a set of quiz questions, mine was general knowledge but you can make it anything you want: tenses, vocabulary, spelling, etc.

I asked a student a question and when they didn’t answer correctly they had to spin the wheel and eat a jelly bean. It was exciting because they didn’t know what flavour they would get, so they tried to answer correctly as the game progressed, hence the motivation.

You can use it as an energizer when your students seem in need of a little excitement and fun. It can be used at the end of the lesson as a filler, or as a form of a reward after a difficult test. You can also hack the spin wheel and add different questions to each section. If the student answers correctly, they don’t have to eat the jelly (or they can, if they want to risk it). If they can’t answer the question correctly, they have to eat the jelly.

My favourite way how to use it is to let them write the questions, and I mostly use it for vocabulary revision. I prepare vocabulary cards on certain topic and each of the cards contains the word which they need to explain and colour of the jelly bean.

They spin the wheel, and if they can’t explain the word they have to eat the bean of the matching colour. Which can be delicious or quite sickening. Just make sure the kids are ok with this kind of game and have some tissues ready, some spitting may occur!

Other games and speaking activities:

28 Conversation Starters

Role plays- Travel

 

 

Online Vocabulary Activity With Pictures.

I want to share with you a fun activity which I found on the website of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It is called Name That Thing, and that is exactly what you do. They show you a picture of an everyday object or a part of it and you have to choose the correct word. Sometimes, the object is not that familiar, like for example flying buttress. 

You will have 15 seconds to guess each word and the faster you are the higher the points. The game is a lot of fun and a great way how to learn new vocabulary.

There are also many other games, quizzes, crosswords, and puzzles. Have fun!

Some more vocabulary activities for ESL students  >>>Travel/Holiday Vocabulary Cards, Media/Entertainment Vocabulary Card Game Based on Taboo, Business English Vocabulary Card Game | Forbidden Words,

Business English Vocabulary Card Game | Forbidden Words

Forbidden Words is a game card activity based on Taboo. The aim of the game is to explain given words, but without those words that you would most likely use because those are taboo – that means, you can’t use them. The simplicity of this game allows for endless variations and you can use it to teach any vocabulary you wish. This is a Business English Vocabulary game for adults and teenagers.

This version contains 27 cards, each with 5 words, which gives you together 105 words you can use for teaching or revision with your students.

Each card contains one keyword (the word you have to explain) and 4 forbidden words which may not be used when explaining the keyword. If it is too difficult to explain the keyword without using forbidden words, you can allow your students to use one or more of the forbidden words.

Download  >>>> Business Vocabulary Card Game I Forbidden Words

Download Travel card game >>>>Travel&Holidays

Download Media card game >>>>Media Card Game

28 ESL/EFL Conversation Starters to Spark Conversation

There are not enough conversation questions in the resource universe to satisfy the needs of an average EFL/ESL teacher. We need more, more! Especially, when you teach one-on-one, the search for good questions can be excruciating.

I put together 28 questions which can help the conversation to get going. Some of them are closed questions, they can be answered by yes or no, but it should be made clear before you start the activity that the students are not allowed to do that.

I suggest that they talk about each question for about 2 minutes, and only after that time the teacher can ask follow-up questions.

Some of the questions can be viewed as a bit controversial, so I recommend you use them with adults or older students.

Download >>>28 Conversation Starters

You can also try my other speaking activity >>>> Role plays- Travel

Make Game Quizzes For ESL Lessons

My younger students are very competitive and playful, and I love that about them. It is great to see that they are engaged and immersed in the activity, that they are having fun; and that they don’t even realise they are learning.

I am always in need of new resources, games, flash cards, you name it! Sometimes, I make my own, you can download them here: Media Card Game, Restaurant Menu Pair Work,  Travel&Holidays Card Game, Role plays- Travel. Another time, I happily turn to many online resources an ESL teacher can use. The one I recently used to revise reported speech, is Jeopardy Labs. It is an online template builder which allows you to build customised jeopardy (or a basic quiz game) template. It has a very simple, intuitive editor and when you have no time to build your own, you can browse games created by other people.  I got tons of results when I searched for reported speech and there are plenty of quizzes on other subjects, too!

I haven’t written the best part yet; you can create up to 12 teams, you can download the game and play it later directly from your web browser (so no internet needed for playing the game), it counts the points automatically (you just click the green plus button, or red minus button). Each game has 5 categories and from 100 to 500 points which you can assign according to the question difficulty. It has a clean, simple design, it is absolutely easy to use and I love it. Try it too and let me know what you think!

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