Stimulating Starters

How you start your lesson can often have the biggest impact on pupils engagement and behaviour. Pupils have come from another room, another subject and another teacher. How do you welcome them into your classroom and tell them that you mean business? In this post, I hope to show you some ways in which you can engage learners from the minute they step through the door.

Spicing Up Speaking

Speaking can often be the hardest skill to get pupils involved in and to assess on a regular basis. With many of our teenagers being shy and not overly confident with their speaking and presentation skills in English (never mind in another language!), it can be quite a hard barrier to overcome.

Revitalising Reading

How often do we just give pupils another text to work through, answer questions on and then find the French/Spanish/German? After doing mountains of past papers with year 11 and reading assessments with years 7 and 8, I've been fed up with the whole idea of reading for a grade rather than enjoyment. Reading for pleasure should be something that we try to incorporate and encourage in our language lessons. So how can we help our pupils get more from their reading?

Interactive Objectives

Objectives are something that are instilled into the UK classroom with the firm belief that if pupils know what they are aiming for, it will help them navigate the route there. However, objective sharing can become a stale, necessary evil rather than an integral introduction to the lesson. In this post, I hope to show you how you can make objectives a little bit more interesting for yourself and your pupils.