This is a great simple activity to practice their reading and writing skills while talking about some unusual facts about Christmas.
Activity Time: 15 mins
Level: Teens and Adults Intermediate +
First put your class in pairs. Tell them to write the following information on a piece of paper or on their notebooks. Make sure...
Make a Christmas Wishing Tree
1. Using green paper or card, have students trace around the outline of their hand.
2. Cut out the handprints.
3. Holding their handprint so that the fingers point downwards, ask each student to write a Christmas wish on their hand. They can write their own wish, or one for a friend or family member.
4. Using glitter...
Text by: Evangelia Vassilakou
Traditional vocabulary instruction focuses on pre teaching either difficult or low frequency vocabulary. This can cause students to stop reading a text because of unfamiliar words. On the contrary, Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) departs from a traditional vocabulary approach and effectively develops...
Over 25 different questions to get the class talking about Christmas.
Level: Teens and Adults all levels.
• Did you enjoy last Christmas? Why?
• How do you celebrate Christmas?
• What is a traditional Christmas like in your country?
• Do you decorate the outside of your house for Christmas?
• Do you eat a turkey dinner for...
Graded readers or ‘readers’ are books that contain language adjusted to the level of the learner. The language is graded for vocabulary, complexity of grammar structures and also by the number of words. They are made to cater for all levels from beginners to advanced.
Graded readers can help learners build their confidence in reading, and...
Text by: Marina Siskou
A rarely defied teaching practice is the random introduction of the target language vocabulary beyond content.
Being presented with a bulk of target language words to ingest might turn out to be functional, if L2 learners are good at memorization. However words need to belong somewhere in order to mean...
Christmas Taboo is a simple game you can play in class to revise Christmas vocabulary. The aim of the game is simple; each person takes a card and they must describe the word on the card without saying or using that word or any of the additional words written on that card.
Level: Young learners and teens.
Text by: Steve Vassilakopoulos
Most teachers find it frustrating when new vocabulary is presented, learnt and forgotten all in the same lesson. There are different ways to make new vocabulary memorable, however not all are successful and of course all students have their own ‘learning style’ so one size does not fit all.
That being...
The approach to building basic vocabulary involves identification of the most basic vocabulary, the benefits of extensive reading, the strengths of explicit instruction in vocabulary and the importance of using word notebooks and dictionaries. English-language learners (ELLs) face a learning paradox: on one hand they need vocabulary to be able to read...
