If you haven’t seen post by Jason Renshaw, definitely check it out for ideas on making coursebooks more flexible and giving students and teachers more choice. The comments are great as well.
I put my vision for a flexible text in the comments, but to reiterate here, I would love to have an electronic textbook (seems to me it could be a CD-ROM or a web-based service) that allowed you to plugin what you want to do for your lesson: i.e.
Level: Pre-Int
Area: Vocab
Skill: writing
Theme: Cities
and have it spit out the appropriate …Continue

The first of April might seem a strange time to launch something new. However, that’s what I’m doing.
I’m going to try to write a discussion lesson plan for every day of the year. 365 discussion-oriented lesson plans on a different theme with some connection to the date. Everything from holidays like Valentine’s Day and Christmas to World Health Day and Science Day to historical anniversaries and events.
Of course there’s no reason you have to follow the lesson of the day if another topic captures your fancy.
Each lesson has a …Continue

This isn’t a proper lesson plan but I put together a little webquest for students on April Fools Day. The answers also make a nice set of hoaxes, jokes and pranks to talk about for an April Fools’ Day lesson.
Feel free to use it, or add comments, suggestions and crtitiques: April Fools’ Day WebQuest And I forgot to link to the Answers earlier (which are also linked to on the webquest page itself.
Or have students do their own webquests. Refer them to Hoaxipedia or the Wikipedia entry on April …Continue

Teaching Recipes is a cool site I came across thanks to the TEFL Net newsletter. It’s a collection of lesson plans and activities, but what it seems to have a lot of, that other sites don’t have, is small tips and tricks or explanations of common techniques like how to do a dictogloss or neat little guessing games.
For ELT Bloggers and writers, they take submissions, so it’s a good place to put up an idea and get some exposure as well as some feedback hopefully.

How using custom post types can help teachers to manage and post their lesson plans more effectively. Basically my thoughts on how custom post types can help teachers and Edubloggers use Wordpress as a content management system.

Although I designed this lesson plan to be about food and holiday foods in general, it originally came from a lesson I taught in an English speaking club about Thanksgiving. The Food Lesson Plan gives students a chance to talk about their national food, then gives you a chance to discuss Thanksgiving and the traditional foods we eat on that holiday. Finally students get talk about their special holiday meals. It’s a great way to approach Thanksgiving with international students because they may not know a lot about this primarily …Continue

Halloween is coming and there’s a ton of stuff on the Internet for teachers. I’ve put together a lesson plan for Halloween based on the best and most interesting activities I could find. It’s especially hard to find a lesson targeted to students who have never celebrated Halloween, so if you’re teaching abroad this lesson plan is for you.
First you have students generate vocabulary, and activate what they do know about the holiday as well as what they know about monsters and scary stories. Then students read some popular …Continue

Just put up a new lesson plan Newspaper using a real English-language newspaper. It’s something I designed to go along with Straightforward Intermediate, Unit 8A but I think it works as a stand alone lesson. If you have a large class, it might be a good lead-in to doing a school newspaper as a project. It can also be a good way to find out the interests of your students, since part of the lesson asks for them to choose an article and read it.