A secret to radically improving your EFL VYL English classes

by David | Tips

Here’s a short teacher tip that one of the mentor teachers at my language school once shared with me, as a secret to improving my classes. It’s so simple, and incredibly obvious, and to some extent I’d been exploiting it already, although not to its...

Sources of games ideas for kindergarten EFL/ESL classes

by David | Games, Kindergarten

I remember when I first started teaching EFL kindergarten, I had an embarrassingly small repertoire of games that I would repeat every lesson. These days I have far more games ideas, and my quest is more to refine my list of ideas into games that are the most...

What kids like: the secret to a good class

by David | Kindergarten, Tips

Having an understanding of what children like, and integrating that into your lesson design, I think, is one of the secrets to having great lessons. I remember when I first started teaching that I was scared stiff that the children wouldn’t like me, or that I...

Teaching with chants in the EFL/ESL Kindergarten English classroom

by David | Training, Video

Here’s a video on how to use simple chants in the very young learner classroom from one of my favourite VYL authors, Herbert...

The biggest mistakes I made when teaching phonics

by David | Alphabet, Phonics

One of the first mistakes I made when I began teaching phonics, was teaching the wrong letter sounds. Because most of the videos on YouTube either use incorrect letter sounds or they mix up long and short sounds (thereby potentially confusing children), it was an easy...

Creative Book Builder – App Review

by David | Apps, Technology, Tools

Creative Book Builder by Tiger Ng ($4.99) is an app for Mac, iPad, and Android that allows you to easily create professional looking eBooks. But they’re not just the typical e-Books that you might be familiar with. That is, a PDF or ePub document with image and...