Had another awesome English Club. Of course, the theme was Valentine’s Day and there was a nice mix of boys and girls and new and old. Could have been a sensitive subject but no one was particularly shy. Like the best English Clubs, I kicked it off with a few questions and soon it took on a life of its own.
Issues that came up were what do young people call people they are dating: lover, girl or boy friend or sweetheart. I clarified like this: boyfriend and girlfriend is …Continue

Corruption is a serious problem around the world so it’s something students can talk about. It’s also an important topic because often students from corrupt countries never examine their attitudes toward giving and taking bribes–either they think it’s very bad or they think it’s very normal. My Corruption Lesson Plan has students think about what corruption really is, how to stop it, and whether or not it is a serious problem by presenting real life situations, a realistic story and even a scientific and slightly offbeat study of corruption by …Continue

The Food lesson plan is one that goes over very well with students. It’s accessible to everyone. Beginners can handle describing their native dishes simply and you can push more advanced learners to describe detailed recipes. The lesson also has a multicultural aspect as the teacher can introduce common foods from his/her home country. Finally, the plan moves on to discussing holiday meals, which means this lesson can be used for any holiday, especially holidays that have associations with special foods: Christmas, New Years, May Day, Nauryz, Easter, Ramadan, Passover.
Or …Continue

This lesson plan is based on a bunch of different plans that I have seen here and there. Have You Ever, Would You Ever basically asks students a number of hypothetical questions to get them talking about extreme situations. I wrote this list as one appropriate to younger learners as well as to former Soviet learners based on their experiences. It can obviously be rewritten as you see fit. It’s a great plan because it can work as a first day lesson, or as a quick activity to kill some …Continue

As I am moving my site over to the WordPress system, I’m also reorganizing everything so that as much as possible is included in the WordPress installation as possible. That way everything will be much easier to find for you, my readers. As I do that, I’m also going to take the chance to post about the lesson plans.
So the first lesson plan to be ported is not a lesson at all. It’s an article, Why Plan?, which includes a lesson plan template and advice on basic ways to …Continue

I put up a new article on English Advantage for ESL teachers onwhy and how to plan a lesson. As I say in the article, the most important reasons to have a plan are so that you have clear goals set out for your lesson. Otherwise you are just filling up time and/or entertaining students; both of these can be important too but without a goal, you aren’t really educating. Also students don’t respect teachers who try to improvise everything or aren’t prepared to answer their basic questions about a …Continue