Keep Calm and Teach English

Safer Internet Day 2017 will be celebrated globally on Tuesday 7th February with the slogan ‘Be the change: Unite for a better internet’.  The day offers the opportunity to highlight positive uses of technology and to explore the role we all play in helping to create a better and safer online community.  As young children and teens are more and more involved in social media without actual guidance, it is vital for schools to offer them advice on internet etiquette and safety  as well as model responsible behaviour and use.  The official page  of the campaign offers a gallery of resources in many languages together with lesson plans for students of all ages.  You can find ready made activities especially designed for EFL learners in the British Council . Levels range from A1 to C2 so there is something for everyone there. 

The Critical Thinking Community defines critical thinking as the "intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action." A critical thinker (among other things), raises vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely in order to reach conclusions and solutions. The Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet  helps you formulate a range of questions to help your students build critical thinking skills. The cheatsheet  includes categories for Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Each section has eight questions that begin with their corresponding word. The questions are meant to be versatile and broad, and applicable to a range of topics. You can download and print your own pdf infographic from the Global Digital Citiz

Question words are used to ask about specific qualities, times, places, people, etc. They are different from yes / no questions.  The most common question words in English are the following:  (image from the  language learning base )

Welcome back and Happy New Year Holidays are (unfortunately) over, and we are all looking forward to new and creative lesson ideas to spice up our classes.  Below is part of a story created with the help of  Plot Generator , a helpful little site, which promises to give you "inspiration for your next novel, film or short story".   Students can have fun and learn how to build narratives by