"Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary" Presentation

Welcome, Berezanka District Teachers of English! Thank you for visiting my blog, and I hope you enjoyed the seminar on October 30^th, 2012.

Please see the presentation entitled “Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary” here, and also search my blogs for other ideas for your classroom. Please feel free to use any ideas, resources, pictures or games you see here.

Happy Teaching!

Further Thoughts on Reusing and Stock Supplies

Further Thoughts on Reusing and Stock Supplies

Even if students have seen the same flashcards or visuals in the past, there are multiple ways to use them again and keep visuals interesting.

For example, I have a stock set of people that I use for many different things:

1.       They are used to describe the family and relationships within the family.

They work well with a Family Tree activity:

 

Blank Family Tree (Template)

Family Tree with members put in place

 



2.       I use them to study location and prepositions, too. For example:

Where is he?
He is at the sports-ground.


 

Where is she?
She is at school.

 

Where are they?
The are at the cafe.

 

 3.       I use them to have students describe physical attributes when they are learning adjectives.

 

 

With proper care and storage, you can preserve your work to use many times over in many different activities; this works well for other types of supplies, too, like board games, card games, quizzes, grouping strategies and dialogues.

Happy Teaching!

Marks? What marks?!

Students in Ukraine receive scores out of 12. In this rubric, I have allowed those 12 points to include their neatness, performance and creativity. It is helpful to make a potentially subjective score become more concrete and objective.

Method Name: Rubrics

Number of Participants:	Any, the entire class
Benefits:	Rubrics are a form of assessment; it is formatted as a chart and each column represents the number of points a student may earn based on his/her performance in that category. Each row represents a requirement that the student must fulfill in order to earn the points for an overall score.   Click here for more information on how to create rubrics.   Click here to make your own rubric now!     There are many benefits to rubrics. Students will know exactly how they are being assessed, and will be able to assess themselves even prior to submitting work.
Different Uses:	Can be used on individual assignments, or as a daily score for overall performance (as seen in the example below)
Materials Needed:	Poster paper and Markers (or you can use photocopies of the rubrics, too!)

Number of Participants:

Any, the entire class

Benefits:

Rubrics are a form of assessment; it is formatted as a chart and each column represents the number of points a student may earn based on his/her performance in that category. Each row represents a requirement that the student must fulfill in order to earn the points for an overall score.

 

Click here for more information on how to create rubrics.

 

Click here to make your own rubric now!

 

 

There are many benefits to rubrics. Students will know exactly how they are being assessed, and will be able to assess themselves even prior to submitting work.

 

Different Uses:

Can be used on individual assignments, or as a daily score for overall performance (as seen in the example below)

Materials Needed:

 Poster paper and Markers

(or you can use photocopies of the rubrics, too!)

Rubric Example above courtesy of

 its.guilford.k12.nc.us  



Rubric Example above courtesy of
http://www.google.com.ua/imgres?hl=en&sa=G&biw=1024&bih=652&tbm=isch

They don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care

Activity Name: Student Journals

Number of Participants:	Any (although smaller numbers are often more manageable)  Optimal number: 3 to 10 really dedicated students
How-to:	Student journaling is very simple and effective, but you must be committed to it. Students must receive prompt, in-depth feedback for the interest in journaling to last. In my TEFL classroom (or ESL, as well) I use student journaling to hold informal, written “conversations” that will help students to learn a more functional, communicative English. Through trying to communicate their ideas, students more easily identify where there are holes in their language learning, and will begin rectify those holes. Click here for more information or ideas!
Benefits:	Practice English in a ‘real-life’ context rather than simply academic English.   Students receive feedback in a written form that they can refer to in the future.   Students identify words/concepts they are unable to communicate and will ‘teach’ themselves in order to be able to communicate. (In this way, the journal can act as a sort of dictionary, too!)   Students are motivated by a teacher who cares about them and is interested in their lives.
Different Uses:	Practice formal compositions and their construction Increase vocabulary by assigning new words to use Give writing prompts that they must respond to
Materials Needed:	Journals Paper, glue, stickers and markers to personalize and decorate

 

Examples of (personalized) Student Journals