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Spicy Tooth

ESOL – Literacy – Numeracy

Why I prefer Zoom for English language teaching

Here in the UK, we’re a few weeks into remote teaching and learning and many of us (teachers and students) have been trying to get to grips with online classes. At the place where I work, Teams is being heavily pushed onto us by the senior management as a platform that is easy to use….

Graham Shaw Shows You How You Can Draw

In two separate TED talks, Graham Shaw shows us how easy it is to draw and the value of drawing in terms of helping to remember things. I’ve often tried to get my learners to draw pictures to help them remember vocabulary and sometimes they react with a little reluctance, saying that they can’t draw….

Skills for Life ESOL materials

The Excellence Gateway site has finally got round to organising the Skills for Life ESOL materials and presenting them on an ‘Exhibition Site‘. It is actually quite impressive, given the difficulty in locating resources previously on the main Excellence Gateway site. The menu at the top provides easy access to all of the ESOL materials…

Warmers and fillers

Warmers and fillers are short activities that are used at the start a lesson or in the middle of a lesson to fulfil one or more purposes. These may include engaging learners, introducing some variety into a lesson and developing group dynamics. It is useful for a teacher to have a bank of these activities…

Online-Stopwatch.com

Do you ever find it difficult to know the right time to tell learners to stop doing an activity? Do you find it difficult to fit everything you planned into the lesson? Using a timer may be the answer! Online-Stopwatch.com provides you almost every kind of timer you could ever want and some you never…

Love is…

Here are some resources that can be used in the classroom for Valentine’s Day. The Ad Council created a video titled ‘Love has no labels’. It is a great classroom resource for diversity and inclusion. What is love? by Ghulam Rasool Ghick Below is a text written by an English student called ‘What is love?’…

Newspapers

There are an incredible range of online newspapers, many of which are free. A lot of online newspapers have e-editions, that present the newspaper as it would appear in a traditional newspaper. Here are a selection of e-editions: The Metro was originally a free London newspaper that was distributed at London Underground stations. It has…

BarryFunEnglish

BarryFunEnglish is a site with a comprehensive range of resources for practising English. There are interactive and printable flashcards, games, worksheets and teaching tools. The teaching tools and printable flashcards are completely free to use, while the other resources ‘cost’ 1 credit per use. Signing up for a free account gives you 8 free credits…

Christmas

Here are a selection of Christmas resources for use with ESOL learners. I created some of these resources myself over the years. Others are my favourites from the Internet. As a warmer, here are links to a vocabulary matching and gapfill I created about Christmas in the UK. WhyChristmas.com has a ‘Christmas around the world‘…

StoryWeaver

StoryWeaver is a digital library of multilingual stories primarily for children. However, the stories can also appeal to adults, particularly those who are learning English (and other languages). As many teachers of English to second language speakers know, there is a shortage of non-Western-centric texts out there, with course books typically focusing on Western culture….