Lyndsey's ESL Blog

This project is called Word Cloud: Getting to know your classmates and it has been designed for a group of students in their second year of secondary school, though it may also be carried out with other levels, making the required language and contents more or less difficult. The idea is to create a fun project to start after the initial evaluation to review basic language and for the kids to get to know one another a little better. The final product will be an oral presentation in Genially in which they introduce one of their classmates using a Word Cloud to help them create a visual image. The objectives of this project are:  Produce oral and written texts describing personality, likes, hobbies and other personal details.  Understand oral texts about interest, hobbies, personality and other personal details.   Create a word cloud in WordArt and a presentation in Genially. Interact with classmates in the target language.  The project should last about four weeks, given that students

This sequence has been designed to carry out with students in the 3rd year of compulsory secondary education during March to celebrate International Women’s Day. The sequence has a number of learning objectives. Firstly and most importantly, the main objective is to raise awareness about the lack of women in science and get students thinking about the reasons behind this. Besides that, students will develop their reading skills and learn how to use linking words and relative clauses.  Timetoast is an excellent application for this because students will be able to see in a very visual way that there have been many important women in the field of Science over the years despite not receiving the same recognition that their male counterparts have got. Being able to visualise this will get students to reflect on the inequality women have suffered over the centuries and continue to suffer. What is more, the timelines can be easily printed off and displayed in the school to educate others abo

  Here is my story created on Storyjumper . In the previous activity, I realised that I rarely use the process approach to writing in my English classroom and so I thought I would try to come up with a sequence following this approach while also incorporating the tool Storyjumper. I had a look at both Pixton and Storyjumper before getting started and I found the scenes and props were much more limited on Pixton leading me to opt for the latter.   Given that we are towards the end of the first term, realistically I have not got time to carry out the sequence explained below with any of my groups, therefore I will have to explain it from a hypothetical point of view.  The sequence would be carried out during the Halloween period with a group of students in their 3rd year of CSE, and the story in Storyjumper would be the final product. While there would be cooperative activities in groups of four leading up to the final product, the final product in Storyjumper would be an individual task

Here is the very first video I have edited using Edpuzzle . I chose this video to incorporate into the project I am currently carrying out with my students in their second year at secondary school. This is a difficult age and I have noticed that some students are more demotivated at school after months at home and the ongoing measures. Therefore the project has the aim of teaching the children about what a Lingua Franca is, why English is important for them and their future and hopefully encouraging them to see the subject as useful and not just something compulsory during their high school years.   While this video is not perfect, unlike other videos I found, there isn’t so much written text on the visual aids. This was one of the reasons for choosing it. There were other videos which contained more interesting contents, however much of what was said was also written on the images shown during the video which would inevitably turn the activity into a reading task rather than a listeni

My Reflections On Reading Have a look at the images and think about your own reading habits. Have they changed? What kind of books or texts are the people reading? Did they choose the books themselves or did someone else choose for them? In most of the pictures, it seems people are reading books (either in a paper or a digital format). While people read books for many different reasons, I think most of the reading we generally do on a daily basis tends to be shorter texts, things like reading Tweets, posts on social media, the information we see displayed in our surroundings, instructions, subtitles and so on. Though part of this reading may be for pleasure, there is also a lot we do out of necessity. It is difficult to fathom whether the people in the pictures have chosen their own reading material, although it is likely that the children in the classroom did not choose their book given that all the kids have got the same one. Like with most things, everybody has different tastes and

Are you finding it hard to learn English? Learning a second language can be difficult and therefore in class or when doing homework, it's always tempting to open Google translate and let it do the work for us. However, if we constantly rely on this tool, it will be much harder to improve our language skills.  In class, I like to teach my students to use Wordreference . It's a great online tool (and app) that has many functions to help us with vocabulary, grammar and punctuation. I strongly recommend watching this tutorial and playing around with the app for yourself. It won't do the work for you, but it will certainly help! Here is another tutorial in Spanish, just in case! Another online resource I find very helpful for learning a second language is Linguee . This awesome tool gives you examples of the word, collocation or expression you are looking for in real contexts. It's very useful for checking to see how certain language is used, what p