The ESL Playground

  Interacting Orally... From Home Dishwasher noises, kids walking around, parrots playing with their toys, missing or extra plurals... That's what you will be hearing in the background of this video. But guess what? It is our new reality now... making lemonade with the lemons we've been given. A new era has begun in education. Just take a moment to think about one thing you will do differently when schools reopen. To help teachers out, I have created a set of 10 oral interaction activities that you can do with your students using a video call platform. Please watch the video if you are interested as it was created to replace the traditional teacher's guide. I thought it would be easier to understand if I explained it instead of trying to make my ideas clear to you in a long and exhaustive teacher's guide. I hope these activities will be useful for you guys, be it now or in a future when kids are officially back to school. Stay Safe!

  Storytelling in Cycle One

  Robots in ESL I must admit I was a little skeptical at first. How can robots help the development of competencies in ESL? They can be very entertaining, but what can they bring to a language class? Lately, I had the chance to collaborate with colleagues and share about our visions of how robots could be used in the ESL classroom. Would you be willing to use robots on your first day of school? I personally think it would be a great way to break the ice, trigger collaboration and prompt students to speak English right away. How do you think this activity would reflect on your classroom climate? I'm pretty sure it would be beneficial. Of course, students would need enough functional language and vocabulary input and resources to be able to complete the task effectively. When it comes to competency development, the task may vary depending on the robots available. Use robots to create problem-solving activities in which students will have to interact orally to find an answer or soluti...

  Chromebooks... my new best friends If I had to describe a Chromebook to someone who has never heard of it, I would problably say it's half a laptop, half a tablet. To me, it's the best of both worlds. It's portable, it's lightweight, it has a long battery life, it's cheap, it has a keyboard (I hate that tablets have no keyboards for students to write and edit texts) and, it makes teachers' lives a lot easier when combined with the use of Google for Education. No more "forgot to save", "forgot it at home" or "the dog ate it" excuses. Not only is it a great tool to support students' development of all three competencies, but it also is helpful with differentiation for special needs students and fast learners. This year, at our board, two ESL teachers have been experimenting with Chromebooks in their classroom. With only four Chromebooks per class, they have been using them mainly in workstations. We have developped a series of t...

  C2: Reinvestment Made Easy Watch the preview!! Have you ever felt like you just didn't know where to start with C2? When it comes to creating activities to demonstrate understanding, many of us have tons of ideas. But as soon as the word "reinvestment" is pronounced, our minds go blank. Well, not anymore. With the help of six amazing teachers from my board, we tackled the issue of reinvestment and created different LES for cycle 2 and cycle 3. Watch the following preview of our captivating learning and evaluation situations. Here are a couple of important tips we came up with while working on our different C2 tasks. We hope they will be as useful for you in the future development of C2 tasks. 1- Make sure students explore and develop understanding of the texts together before doing the reinvestment task. 2- Use demonstration questions that will guide students in selecting the pertinent information for the reinvestment. 3- Create your reinvestment task and expectations b...

  Register HERE and NOW! Register through the following form:  https://goo.gl/forms/ucAhUe7hrt42HLuB3 Watch preview