Changes

Hello everyone!! It's been I while since I posted, but I had some big changes. I just started teaching in a primary school(hurray!!) and the blog will now focus more on third and fourth graders more than anything. I hope you enjoy following my new journey!! :)

Word Race

For this game you have to divide your students into two lines. Then you call out something that they have to write on the blackboard ( you can say a letter of the alphabet, a word, a verb, the past of a verb or even ask them to draw a picture!).

The first person of the line runs to the blackboard and writes the word. The first person to finish gets a point for their team and go to the back of the line.

This is a great game where you can practice any type of vocabulary or grammar (you can ask them to write a sentence) and is suitable for any age, since you can adjust the difficulty.

Reading Area

This is the Reading Area in my classroom. It is not very big but whenever I can I add a new book!

When the students come in early they can read a book, or when they finish an activity before than the rest. They love flicking through the books!

Every now and then, we choose a book and we read it all together sitting on the carpet. As we know, children love to listen to stories!

There are great books there, like the Mr. Men and Little Miss collection, or the all time favorite Spot! These are books that I loved when I was a little girl and we read them in class :)
Fox in Socks is also one of my favorites. It has a lot of tongue twisters that children really enjoy learning and then repeat all day long!

Mother's Day Card

Here is an idea of a Mother's Day card. I've taken it from pennilessteacher.com

Dictations

Dictations are a great way of practicing different language skills. On this webpage you can find great info about dictations.

If you keep them short and sweet, the children actually like them!

You can also try Picture Dictations, where instead of writing, the children have to draw whatever you are describing.

The good thing about dictations is that you can adapt them to any level, any age and any topic.

Vocab Lists

This is a very good game to review any kind of vocabulary.
We make teams of two or three (each team can make up a name). The teacher calls out a topic (animals, food, things we can find at school...) and in one minute, each team has to write as many words as they can.
When the minute is over, we all read the words and see which team has the most.

You can use it with children from 9 years old to even adults!

Tummy Ache

I've always loved this game! I played it when I was a student myself, and now I use it with my students, and they all love it too! It works with children from 4 to 12. If you have very large classes you can always put the children into teams.
It is a very good way of teaching some food and drink, and then you can use the cards to play other games (like what am I? or Guess what I am!)

You can buy it from this website.

Guess who I am!

For this game, you need to place some cards (you can use the bingo call out cards again) facing down. One student picks up one, and the rest have to guess what or who they are by asking yes/no questions.

The student who guessed correctly has to pick another card, and the game starts all over again. :) 

What am I?

This is a very fun game that children love to play. The students make a circle. In the middle, you put some  cards with objects in them (you can use the bingo call out cards). The teacher starts describing one, and the children have to guess which item it is. You can vary the difficulty of the description depending on the level of the children.

If you are using this with secondary students or adults, the person who guesses the object can describe the next one.

Teaching Vocab with Bingo

A great way of teaching vocabulary to the students is by playing bingo. You can buy these games or you can make them yourself.

In this great webpage you can make your own, and free! Look around as you will find much more useful stuff for your classroom.

I play bingo with students of all ages, from infants to teenagers, even sometimes with adults! And they all love it!

You can also use the call out cards to play different games as well, like What am I? or Guess who I am!.

Working with Schedules

If you work with kindergarten students you might find this way of teaching very interesting

Welcome!

This is my first entry ever! I hope you enjoy the ideas that I´ll be posting regularly to help us through our teaching journey.
Don´t forget to leave any comments if you like!