Last summer I attended an excellent acceleration workshop at Porterville College. Melissa Long was our presenter and we were constantly busy with her multitude of activities for us to experience. We walked away with a binder of activities she has used from the years she’s been teaching ESL acceleration. I was impressed with the following handout which breaks down the paragraph into the five components, or PIQUEAT for short. Read on! PIQEAT Paragraphs Annie
Author: Annie
101 Ideas for Your First Three Weeks of Class
First impressions are sometimes critical in how students view the new class, new teacher, new classmates, and overall what they think of the class. This is a collection of faculty strategies for creating a positive environment during the first three weeks of college classes. The different categories include helping students make transitions, directing student’s attention, challenging the students, providing support, encouraging active learning, team building, and more. Some ideas I’m sure we have all implemented, […]
Where do the homework scheduled hours fit in?
Although I’ve been teaching for many years, this last semester I had one class where too many students came to class without having completed their homework. I knew that many students had jobs, and family, but it was an eyeopener after I had each student fill in what a typical week consisted of with regards to their scheduled time commitments. Next semester I will have them complete their weekly schedule (with homework hours included) at […]
Kinesthetic Practice with Past Tense using Laminated Cards
Tesol Planner has a wealth of creative ideas which include quite an assortment of colored pictures of verbs that can easily be laminated and cut up to make small piles of student activities. This activity challenges students awareness of the past tense. I give each student a stack of mixed regular and irregular cards. They are to distinguish which verbs belong to the regular “ed” side, and which are irregular. Next, they take the regular “ed” […]
How are you feeling today?
This is a great visual chart of 30 different faces illustrating the intermediate+ adjectives under each face, such as anxious, mischievous, hysterical, and ecstatic. My students have enjoyed learning the new vocabulary by first thinking of a time when they have either experienced a particular strong emotion, or witnessed someone else demonstrating the emotion. Typically I ask them to select five new adjectives, look them up and make sure they understand the new vocabulary word, […]
Personal Shields
This I typically assign as homework the first day of class. I show examples from previous student work, and encourage them to be as creative as they want. The second day of class they get in groups of four and try to mix the nationalities as best I can, and they share their personal shields with each other. The noise level always increases immediately. After they have time to get acquainted with this new material, […]
Learning a Second Language Article with Questions
After students have been introduced to annotating articles with highlighting, asking questions, and writing symbols and comments, this I used in my upper beginning class to reinforce those skills. This reinforces different ways they can increase their own styles of learning the new language. Their comments were extremely positive about what they might try after having read this. >>Learning a Second Language Article<< Annie
My Bonnie Song and Engergizer
Having staffed leadership conferences for many years, this was always my favorite “go to” if I felt everyone needed some extra energy. It also works well at the beginning of class, or to refocus after some challenging classwork. I explain the background of the song, and explain who Bonnie might be. They are always terrible the first attempt, but there’s lots of laughter and astonishment. We try it again, and go even faster once they […]
Campus Online Scavenger Hunt
This I assigned as homework at the beginning of the semester to have students search the campus website to discover services available to them that they might not be aware of. Although this is what we used here at Sierra College, I’m looking forward to creating one for Woodland Community College. It will be similar. >>Scavenger Hunt<< Annie
Past Tense Regular Verb Pronunciation Activity
Pronunciation of the regular verbs for beginning and intermediate students is always challenging. I created this kinesthetic lesson to provide students a challenging problem solving activity which is easy to correct. I begin with putting the heading of “t”, “d”, and “id” on the whiteboard, and then ask them to tell me which is the final sound as I pronounce a number of different verbs. They tell me. After we have quite a list under […]