TEFL Prague and Abroad

Skip Potts does a demo to a group of intermediate Czech students. The first activity is a Find Someone Who Bingo icebreaker. The second activity is a guess who am I game. The length of the actual activities were about 15-20 minutes. The video has been edited to around 6 minutes. Here's the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2WeZlHaL0

Here's another quick game that I created, but I'm sure another teacher probably created before me, that I use on the TEFL course. You can use this with intermediate and advanced students in groups of threes. Set up:  Two students face each other with a meter apart between them. One student is blindfolded, and the other student strikes a convoluted pose. The more intricate and complex the pose is, the better. Now, a third student instructs the blindfolded student to copy and mirror the pose. It sounds basic, but the language can get really complex. Think 'twist your wrist so it's facing you and extend your first and second finger....Tilt your head back and shrug your shoulder close to your neck' See what I mean? You can have a lot of fun with this, and it's a quick activity to teach and jump into. To make it more engaging, make it a competition, where one person from each team strikes a pose for the other team to solve. This will make the posing students re...

 Using Improvisational games/activities/exercises can be a lot of fun in the classroom and are great linguistic training opportunities. Most activities in language classes deal with students presenting some kind of pre thought out  discourse. The problem with this is that speaking in real life is not as planned. Using Improv will help your students to think on their feet and discuss a variety of situations immediately without translating ideas or writing things down. Here are 6 activities that I created (although I'm sure others have thought of them) that I use in my classes. Tip: Improv is hard stuff and should only be used with students who have a solid speaking base. Most of these activities are only useful for upper intermediate and advanced students. When you first do improv, it will most likely not work that great. Don't worry, with practice and more exposure, your students will get more comfortable and you will see a tremendous growth in their overall output with othe...