Schools receive budgets for creating and printing posters and wall hangings for these rooms, sporting international places and cultural info. The problem is that the posters they end up with often have spelling/grammar mistakes, with low-resolution images stretched haphazardly over odd background photos. Not a stylish way to introduce foreign places to local students.

I’m not a graphic artist, but I’ve made an effort to design some more effective posters, in resolution high enough to look good in a frame about 80cm wide x 120cm high.  The idea isn’t that the posters are the most reflective of the country, nor that the facts on them are the most interesting or profound.  They’re just made to be some nice and vibrant posters to be put up in a room meant for exploring foreign languages and cultures.

You can find the results below:

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the England Poster

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the Canada Poster

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the South Africa Poster

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the Australia Poster

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the New Zealand Poster

Click here to download the whole package!

Some lessons lend themselves easily to explanations & games, but ordinal numbers as a concept are not always straightforward to teach.  I recently attended a workshop in which my group had to prepare a quick demo lesson on ordinal numbers. To teach it, we used four ideas:

• Familiar celebrities (familiar to Korean students, anyway) & Olympic medal positions to introduce the concept of ordinals
• A bit of a math challenge to engage the students in figuring out which number in the series is next, previous, first, and last
• A physical activity to engage a dozen students in organizing themselves in order according to the ordinal written on the card they received
• A “Hotel Game” in which a bell hop moves from cell to cell on a grid, and the students have to yell out, for example, “3rd floor, 5th room!”

Here are the materials we used:

• The presentation as a whole – Click here to download in PDF format & Click here to download in Apple Keynote format
  
• The whole pre-made Hotel Game & directions – Click here to download in PDF format
  
• The Hotel Game board – Click here to download in PDF format
  
• The Hotel Game bell-hop image – Click here to download in JPG format
  
• The Ordinal Number Cards – Click here to download in PDF format
  

Body Parts Flash Cards

Download Body Parts Flash Cards

I put together these Flash Cards using images found online, editing many of them somewhat to add pointers to the specific body part. I tried to choose images which were explicitly public domain. However, please use these only personally, for educational purposes, which is how they are provided. If you know of an image which does not belong in this set, please don’t hesitate to contact me so I can remove it immediately.

Body Parts Bingo

Download Body Parts Bingo 4 x 4

Download Body Parts Bingo 5 x 5

BINGO has a bad rap among some ESL teachers become it is seen as a cop-out for real teaching.  However, after drilling the students on the body part flash cards, I like to have them write the body part names out in English at random in the BINGO squares, and then choose different students to speak out body parts I indicate on myself or other students.  For example, the teacher points to a student’s arm, and asks another student to yell out the word.  “Arm!”, yells the student, and all the other students practise listening by crossing out the word on their BINGO sheet.  Obviously, this is for low-level language learners, and is a more of an ice-breaker than a serious language acquisition activity.

Body Parts Scramble

Download Body Parts Scramble

Like BINGO, the Body Parts Scramble is meant to be given as a fun ice-breaker or easy homework activity.  Although this is not a good way to spend class time, it can be nice used as a puzzle for students to take away in order to practise the content of the flash cards covered in class.

Body Parts Idioms Dialog

Download Body Idioms Dialog Script

[Video Not Yet Available]

This CGI dialog was originally created using xtranormal.com.  I used iMovie to dub in the voices and add the titles, music, and pop-up captions.  It makes for a great listening exercise before the following presentation.

Body Parts Idioms Presentation

Download Body Parts Idioms Presentation

The zip file contains JPGs, ordered by number.  The first and last slides are missing, since they normally contain the intro and walk-out slides that you must customize for your own audience.

This presentation covers Body Parts idioms, such as “he has a head for languages”, “you’re trying to pull the wool over my eyes”, “he’s my right-hand man”, etc.  It’s meant to be presented to more advanced conversational classes.

The images used in these slides were gathered from all over the web, and should be used only for educational purposes as examples of the action or phrase indicated in the slide.

Body Parts Idioms Evaluation

Download Body Parts Idioms Evaluation

This evaluation goes with the previous idioms presentation and video dialog.