There are several steps to making a storybook and I’ll use my own Mr. X’s incredible Day/Yesterday as an example. Get the ppt/video here for use with students.

1.  Tell the story with students. Play a video / use a storybook / use a ppt but pictures are essential! Go slow and exaggerate and use your voice/gestures to communicate vocabulary and content/context.

2.  Students re-tell the story. Note the vocabulary for the story on the board and students use this to make sentences to retell the story. Or, just show pictures and use them as a prompt to retell the story. See how I used Voicethread to retell the Mr. X story. But you can just take the words off the ppt and use a picture only ppt.

3. Writing. Students are now more comfortable with the story and vocabulary. Get them to write 6-10 sentences to outline the story. For each sentence , provide a prompt on the board for lower level students. Higher level students can add more information for that sentence number. The teacher monitors and helps correct/edit. I use this worksheet for Mr. X.

4. Bookmaking.  Give students some sheets of A4. They fold in half and staple to make the book. Or fold again and cut the folds to make a mini book (students usually like this smaller book more!). Students cut and paste their pictures into the book and also write their text from the worksheet. Color, make a title page, borders and personalize.

5. Present/Publish. Students can read their books to the class or in small groups. Sharing is a must! Make a library for your student produced books! 

You can make books about just vocabulary also. You can even use Tar Heel Reader – to get pictures and inspiration for alphabet and vocabulary books. I highly recommend it and if you want to make an electronic book, get a password code and impress your students!

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

In pairs, students silently “mouth” very slowly, the questions from a handout. Simple questions. Go here for many lists - use the simple ones like “Favorites” or “Getting to know you”.   The other student responds with one or two simple sentences.

Students see if they can follow the other person. Doing this they will gain important information about how to get more information than the ear allows and increase their ability to read facial information – so important for language learning/speaking. Plus, they will just have a lot of fun!

This website from the U. of Iowa is the perfect compliment for this exercise and a must site for pronunciation!

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

This lesson recipe is my “go to” lesson. An idea which you can use at the last minute for almost any children’s class. Also a good lesson when unprepared or just plain tired/hungover! (it happens).

Give each student a blank A4 piece of paper. Draw a large rectangle on the board. Give the chalk to one good student (or do it yourself). Write a title – it could be anything: the beach, the mountains, a beautiful day, our school, the city etc…

Ask the students what they see. They will catch on and respond with ..”I see ….!  Draw that and label it. Continue filling up the whole page with students drawing and writing and saying more things they see. 

Get some students to present their drawings afterwards and hang them up around the classroom to inspire your students. If time permits, get the students to turn over their page and draw their own labeled picture on their own topic!

This site, Odopod, offers a nice drawing board and also a wonderful slideshow of other people’s drawings to inspire students.

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

Transl8it.com allows the teacher to enter English text and then get the “text message” equivalent. Simply copy this and handout to students. The students look at the text messaging and “decode” this into proper English. After they are done, ask the students to turn to the page in their book that you took the text/script from and check their answers! (or give them a handout of the original to check against / or get a student to put it on the board).

I have made several Transl8it.com games. The most popular being the “Pop Song” version where students decode song lyrics, then check and listen to the songs. Get them HERE on EFL Classroom 2.0.

Use text messaging to help your students with their writing skills.

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

Video is used a lot by teachers. However, sometimes the internet isn’t reliable so you shouldn’t count on it! But no worries, just use KeepVid and you can enter the youtube video url/address and it will download the video to your desktop. Just rename and it is yours to play whenever you want!

Try doing it with this great video! www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3×4HvXTyGQ

This post was submitted by eflclassroom.