Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Tried and true and new finds

A) Do you like to play games in your language classroom?  I certainly do!  And I truly believe there is a time and place for both a traditional board game and a more technology based one.  The goal? --- to have students learn, reinforce their language learning knowledge while having FUN FUN FUN! At our school we play a trivia game which until just this week was basically a paper-based game where students would answer Country trivia questions in groups.  A competition between one group and another.  And then along came: Kahoot! This on-line game turned our Group Game into an extraordinary Group Game!  Kahoot allows you to create your own games on-line or you can use games that have already been made by others.  Many different themes are available.  How many questions to make for a game?  Well of course that will vary on the difficulty of the questions and how fast you go through the questions but our students were able to answer about 40 questions within a half hour.  There was lots of excitement - multi-national trivia questions answered - reinforcement of cultural learning from the classroom and FUN!  Give it a try in your classroom!

Here's the link:

Get Kahoot

B)
With Valentine's Day just around the corner I've been looking at my files to see what I might like to use with each of my classes this year.  Although I have some "tried and true" activities that I use regularly I always work at finding something new to use each year.  It not only helps my students enjoy their days a little bit more, but it makes my days more enjoyable too. Here is a Linky Party that has just come up on TpT.  Have a look.  You just might find something new.  :)

A Linky Party for Valentine's Day!



Happy Teaching! Lorraine

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

New Year activities

Wow! The New Year is already here and I can hardly believe how quickly it arrived. - 2015! We often think that after Christmas everything slows down but if you really think about it there are so many other events that approach quickly. - In January we have Chinese New Year, Ground Hog Day is at the beginning of February, Quebec City in Canada celebrates the Quebec Winter Carnival and of course "love is in the air" with Valentine's Day soon approaching in February. Have I given you a few ideas as to how to get through the sometimes difficult months of January and February? On the West Coast here we basically have an umbrella attached to our arms for the winter months, however, I must admit that so far this winter it has been much clearer and we have seen many more "blue sky" days. Sometimes we go for weeks without seeing the sun and we laugh about experiencing all 4 seasons in ONE day. But that's just the way it is on the "wet" coast. Here are some of the activities that I use in my classroom to help us get through these darker and wet days. Perhaps you will find something that you can use too. :) Happy Teaching!
Lorraine