Pod cards

8 Podcards from Australia

10 Podcards from England
4 PodCards from Canada
6 Podcards from Ireland
6 Podcards from Scotland
10 Podcards from The USA
6 Podcards from Wales
5 Podcards from New Zealand

PodCards are audio postcards about a town or city from different countries around the world. Or it might be a biography of a famous person or info about something remarkable about this place.

PodCards are for teachers and students of English as a second language. They provide valuable practice to improve learners' listening skills and give teachers additional cross-cultural classroom material. A worksheet is provided for each PodCard.

What's more, PodCards are divided into two levels. Low level PodCards are aimed at students up to and including Pre-Intermediate level - these cards are read at a slower speed and mostly contain structure appropriate to that level.

High level PodCards are read at a higher speed, contain more advanced structures and vocabulary and are for Intermediate students and above.

All in all, it seems to be quite an interesting resource to try with my students for extra listening practice.

Focus on Pronunciation: Stress and Intonation

A while ago my students asked me to give them a class on Pronunciation. To be honest, they don't have any problems with pronouncing English sounds but still don't feel that confident about their accent. So I decided to start with stressed words in the sentence and intonation.
The lesson was successful, so I decided to share the lesson plan:) Hope you find it handy.


Original doc is here.

Warm-up Idea Word Cloud

The game is called Word Cloud. Student A needs to say a word in English related to a particular topic, e.g Health or Shopping, and the following one has to say another word beggining with the ending letter. This is a nice way of practicing your pronunciation and at the same time revising the vocabulary of the unit.The whole game takes no longer than 5 min.

Heidi, Cross-eyed Opossum

Innovations Pre-Intermediate Unit 6 Review

HiLIGHT ezine

I am happy to welcome you to the launch of our school online ezine HighLight. I wish to extend my gratitude to all teachers, students and friends who were so kind to submit their articles to this issue. We could not start this journal without the support of Nastya Shelyakina, Guzelia Ataulova and Sergey Papushin wishing to make this magazine a success.

I strongly believe that for a language school it is important to have a magazinе which gives free access to its contents and promotes communication in English . This is particularly significant for us whose first language is not English. That’s why we aim to invite native speakers to write for our ezine. Frankly, the goal of this project is to involve in writing as many people as possible and go international! The only criteria are willingness to master English and have something to say to the world:)

So if you get inspired and feel like writing something, join us!

HighLight is a peer-reviewed ezine which publishes 3 issues a year – in November, February and April.

I look forward to a successful first year as Editor-in-Chief and welcome any comments or suggestions you may have that would improve the Ezine.

P.S. Our ezine is not a commercial project, and it's on a free website. That's why there're commercial pop-ups on every page. Please, just switch them off and enjoy reading.

Using a projector in the classroom

Yesterday I got inspired by my colleague to make this google presentation for Pre -Intermediate Innovation course - Unit 3.

The thing is it's really important to use as many visuals as possible at any levels I guess. Moreover, showing a presentation doesn't take a lot of lesson time, just 5 -7 minutes. But it should be interactive, I mean students are supposed to be involved. That's why pictures in this presentation appear one by one to promote students' speaking.

Thig presentation is aimed at brushing major vocabulary items of the unit before the progress tests.

Welcome to our project site!

https://sites.google.com/site/ulyanovskregion/

We created this site in the format of the social educational project "Teacher. Web 2.0. Step forward" and dedicated it to Ulyanovsk Region which lies in the South-Eastern part of the Russian Federation and occupies both banks of the Volga river.

The Region is mostly known and famous as Lenin's birthplace.

One more idea of warm up

I like activities like that one -"Simply Clever"

I found it on English-to-go.com.

SHOES

Where were your shoes made?
How did you get them?
What colour/size/shape are they ?
Was there a special reason for getting them?
Where have you been in those shoes?
Ask your students to look at their shoes and think about their history for a minute in silence, then ask them to take a pen and paper and find a partner.

In pairs the students take it in turns to find out as much as possible about the other person's shoes (you may like to have a time limit of 3 minutes each).

While they listen to each other's answers they can take notes.

At the end of the activity each student takes turns to tell the class one interesting thing they found out about their partner's shoes. It really works!

Experiments with Glogster