A class in Gaza with a capacity of 45 to 50 students in a small classroom with very limited recourses and a huge curriculum to cover in a specific short period of time doesn’t seem such a brilliant environment for both teachers and students to teach and to learn. As a teacher, these are extremely challenging circumstances and I always find myself struggling to reach my class objectives, keep the track of time, and get good outcomes from my students.
Read MoreHere's a post by Sahar Salha in Gaza and Alex Guzik in Russia, which shows the wonderful way that teachers are working together to produce very effective classes for children through the Hands Up Project.
Read MoreThe other day I found myself suddenly having to cover an online session in Gaza because I'd forgotten that one of our volunteers wasn't able to make it. I didn't have any specific plans so I began by asking the boys what they would like to do in the session
Read MoreA few years ago I attended a really interesting talk by Jane Willis at an IATEFL conference somewhere. The talk was about using task based learning in challenging circumstances, and there was a point when one of the teachers in the audience was telling everyone about her particular challenge of trying to get learners to use English (rather than mother tongue) to do group work tasks in the large classes of low level learners that she taught.
Read MoreA while back I saw a pretty impressive video on youtube and since then the images from it keep filling my head. It begins with a camera shot from space showing earth as a distant object and then gradually moves closer and closer, zooming in on the world, the continent of Europe, the UK, London and then, eventually streets, houses and finally people become visible.
Read MoreA few weeks ago I was one of the speakers at the IATEFL Pre-conference event organised collaboratively by the C Group and the Global issues special interest group. Towards the end of the day we were given a talk by Julie Pratten about her project Heart ELT which has set up a school in a refugee camp in Iraq. At the beginning Julie gave us all a blank postcard and told us that we would be doing something with it later. As she approached the end of her talk she asked us to use the postcard to write a message to the children in the camp.
Read MoreI love doing activities in class where children feel enthusiastic about contributing. The kind of thing where they've all got their hands up, shouting out 'Ana..Ana.. Ana!' (Me ...me...me). One such activity is 'The game of jewels' as it was referred to in Kipling's novel, or 'Kim's Game' as it has come to be known in the field of ELT.
Read MoreWith rather limited success, I've been trying to learn Levantine Arabic, and over the past year I've probably had about ten one-to-one classes with a Jordanian friend who lives here in Totnes. Saif is an excellent teacher. One thing I particularly like is that he allows me as the learner to control the content of what we talk about in the classes, whilst he supplies me with the language I need to express the things I want to say.
Read MoreLast week I was looking at how talking with children about the pictures they've drawn can be a useful thing to do in a classroom. This week I want to explore a slightly more structured activity which works with this idea.The picture dictation has become a classic language teaching activity. I can't remember where I first heard about but I've been using it ever since I first started teaching more than 25 years ago.
Read MoreHere’s a vocabulary game that I did with the kids in Jabalia a couple of weeks ago. I chose six different lexical sets that they would find in their coursebook (food and drink, things you’d find in a living room, clothes, fruit and vegetables, animals and things you’d find in a classroom) and wrote down five words for each set on separate slips of paper. The girls’ team and the boys’ team took it in turns to send one person up to the front. This person chose one of the lexical sets and then had a minute to try to guess the five words that I’d written down.
Read MoreThis week I started working with a new group of children in the Azraq camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan. It’s taken a while to set this up and I was really pleased to be finally going ahead because it seems that Azraq so far hasn’t had the publicity or the resources that the Zaatari camp has been given.
Read MoreHere’s a simple activity that we did with a group of kids from the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. They were divided into a girls’ team and a boys’ team. I showed each team a series of 10 flashcards and asked one person at the front to try to remember as many of the words as possible.
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