The ESL Playground

  Sharing Google Slides Templates I can feel it. Can you feel it as well? The school year will be ending soon. Schools are buzzing with the sounds of teachers preparing exams and students longing for summer vacations. As a little summer gift, I have decided to share some of my personal Google Slides Templates with you. I added a section on my website where I will upload some more once in a while. I hope it will be useful for your upcoming school year. Until then, I will be preparing new stuff for you busy ESL teachers. I have worked on amazing projects with teachers and colleagues this year that I can't wait to share with you. Stay tuned for new projects, inspiring webinars and collaborations with awesome people from the ESL community.

  101 Google Ideas In the past two years, I've been following amazing educators on Twitter. Whether it is Alice Keeler , Matt Miller or Jennifer Gonzalez , all of these educators share a keen interest in the different Google tools for educators. The possibilities are endless. I recently had the opportunity to share different ideas with ESL teachers who were taking part in the DEESL event. (Thank you all for coming!) You will find the workshop document on a new section of my website entitled TECHNO WHIZ. From now on, this is where I will deposit different ideas related to the integration of educational technologies, especially when they can be used at different levels. Besides giving you awesome ideas on how to use the different Google tools in the ESL classroom, the document contains 47 free-to-use templates, 25 video tutorials and 17 links to websites with great resources. I sincerely hope this will fill your head with new ideas for your ESL class. Click here to get the presentat...

  Breakout Activities on a Budget I was SO excited when I received my first Breakout kit through the mail. I could not wait to try it out with the students. I created the Haunted Castle Breakout activity that you might have seen on the website already. However, I soon realized that the group sizes were a little too large for everybody to enjoy the activity equally. Most students are engaged throughout the activity but unfortunately, they don’t get to try out all the puzzles. Sometimes students even end up arguing, as they all want to use the UV flashlight. That’s when I decided to have students solve the puzzles in teams of 4 instead. This way, everyone would get to witness all the puzzles. However, realistically, I couldn’t get one Breakout box per team and I therefore decided to print out slips of paper with an image of each lock instead. As you might have guessed by now, the box quickly became obsolete. It made me think... Our main objective is for the kids to interact orally wh...

  Revamping the Penpal Experience I often hear teachers talking about their penpalling activity going South for various reasons. Sometimes it takes too much time hearing back from the other class. Other times, missing students will completely disorganize the writing activity. Worst of all, some students might even tell you that they just don't know what to write. But WHAT IF students did not only exchange letters? WHAT IF they could prepare little activities and games for one another? WHAT IF they could collaborate on different writing tasks? Not only would it make the penpal experience a little more engaging, but it would also make the pairing of students easier for the teacher as the exchange wouldn’t have to take place between the same two students all year long. Here's a list of simple ideas to to revamp penpalling activities in the ESL classroom. GET POSTER HERE

  Setting Up a Google Drive Account It's no secret! I'm a big fan of the Google tools. There are just so many ways to use them in the classroom and outside the classroom. You might have noticed that I am sharing many Google Presentations instead of PowerPoint documents. I'm also sharing Google Forms or Google Docs sometimes. In order to enjoy this website as much as possible, I suggest that you create your own Google Drive account. Here's a tutorial . This way, you'll be able to create and save copies of the Google files I'm sharing. You'll see how quickly you'll get addicted to those tools!

  The Case of the Haunted Castle - A Video Tutorial An image is worth a thousand words. As teachers we understand the very nature of this saying when it comes to reading teacher’s guides or lengthy instructions. Therefore, I have decided to create a quick video tutorial for my Grade 6 breakout EDU activity. It’s a nice way to start the Christmas holiday, isn’t it? You will find the new video on my YouTube channel as well as my website. I want to seize the occasion to thank you for visiting my website and signing up to my mailing list. I’ll do my best to keep all of you fellow teachers motivated and inspired with different projects throughout the year to come!

A New Playground for ESL Teachers I've been thinking about creating this website for a while now. However, I kept changing my mind so many times that it actually took over a year for me to finally sit and create it. Have you ever put off something you had to do because you just didn't know where to start? Or because you wanted it to be perfect? Well, I guess that's what I did. So you're probably wondering how this website will be useful to you. My goal is essentially to have a plateform to share projects and ideas to ESL teachers all around the province. I remember when I had to teach elementary ESL in 5 different schools. My car was not only used for transportation but also for stockage. I never spent more than a half-day in a school and I had a hard time catching up on the grading. Especially because I had decided not to use activity books. But, enough about me! By creating this website, I wanted to give access to some activities and LESs that I have the chance to dev...