Paperman

Tell your students they will be writing a story. Tell them to put their pens down and watch the short film, and play them Paperman, below. 

Get your students' opinions on it and check if they need any vocabulary to tell the story of the film. Remind them to write in the past tense. Pair them up and give them 20 minutes to summarize the film in writing. Encourage them to describe places and people.

On the board, write these two sentences:

She said sorry.
She said I am sorry.

Ask if they are both correct. Elicit the correct punctuation for the second:

She said, “I am sorry."

Then elicit how to say it when narrating the girl’s words to a friend:

She said she was sorry.

Elicit the differences between direct and indirect speech: punctuation, change of pronoun, change of tense.

In the same pairs, students should continue the story of the film, creating the dialogue between the two protagonists and noting it down. Then they present their stories. They can also act out their dialogue.

If you have stronger students, they can swap their stories after 10 minutes and continue each others’. Encourage the use of different linking words and descriptive nouns.

Why should teachers have websites?

The first, visceral reaction of teachers when it comes to websites tends to be, "What for? I don't have a business!"

But websites are not just for businesses and advertising (though that doesn't hurt). They can also be used as teaching tools, such as this one. Let's look at a couple of ideas for using websites in the classroom:

1. Putting up your video- and sound-based lessons in an easy-to-access location. You can then teach those lessons from anywhere with an internet connection. (If you don't like sharing, then you can restrict the searchability of your website through the settings).

2. Allowing your students direct access to exercises, tests, or self-study materials that you have chosen for them.

3. Setting up paperless lessons, be it discussion questions, images you want to use in your lessons, or activity instructions.

4. Providing your students with a platform for posting homework and sharing it with the rest of the class.

5. Giving an example to students of how easy and useful it can be to have a website, so they can create their own lesson-related pages.

And below you can see how to make a website of your own!

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! (Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious)

I thought I'd start with one of my most popular go-to lessons when there is no programme to follow or I have to come up with a lesson on the spot. It works for all ages and levels and can be easily linked to other activities.

Objectives:
- Recycle vocabulary that students know in a new context.
- Practise story-telling tenses, vocabulary and structures.

I start the lesson by writing the word PLANET on the board. I get students to make new words out of the letters as an open-class activity, and clarify the rules as they go:

1. Do not repeat letters unless they are repeated in the word.
2. Do not use letters that are not in the word on the board.

Once students have come up with ten or so words, I put a new word down on the board:

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS

I give students twenty minutes to work in pairs, making words from these letters.

During the twenty minutes I go around, moderating the word creation and helping along students who are stuck. Once the twenty minutes are up, I tell students to start writing a story in pairs, using as many of the words they have come up with. They underline the words as they use them and shouldn't repeat them.

Five minutes in, or once they have written an appropriately-sized paragraph for their level, students pass their story to the person on the left who continues it.

Two minutes later, they repeat this.

I repeat this a couple of times until the time they have is down to 30 seconds and they only have time to read the last sentence and write a short sentence of their own.

Once they are done, students get their original story back, they peer-review it, fixing mistakes they can spot. Then they read the stories aloud, and vote for the best one as a class.