A Montanans Tales of Teaching and Travelling

7 Resources for Teaching English Overseas

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You can use these activities in youth gatherings, business meetings, bible studies, and cultural exchange camps. This resource consists of more than 60 proven activities that offer folks a chance to practice their English with you, while having fun at the same time. And having fun together is really the best starting point for making relationships.

We like to photocopy this into little half-paged booklets that all of our DTS students can keep on them during outreach. The activities inside can be added to existing English lessons to make your curriculum come alive. These will also help you as you look for ways to make your lessons more active and engaging for everyone in the group.

I keep a copy of mine in the iBooks library on my phone, just in case. PROS builds relationships, minimal materials required, transferable to different levels and settings, fun for all ages, perfect size for outreach, free downloadable content. As you hand the stewardess your boarding pass and walk through the doors of the airport gate you walk past a tall metal stand that has a few shelves filled with complimentary newspapers. As you find your seat on the plane you take a quick look at the headline. You just found the textbook for your first English lesson.

Most classrooms have textbooks and other materials that are several years old. In addition to this, not every school has the ability to buy beautiful, expensive textbooks for their students. However, there are often wonderful resources located all around us—you only need to look around. Typically, students will be more engaged with a well-made lesson that uses content from their favorite magazine, than a lesson from the fanciest of textbooks.

So, how do you add this content to your lesson? For a simple reading activity, choose an article and have students look at any pictures, titles, or captions in the article. And then do a fun role play based on the people and events from the article. Find activities A3 and A4 in our Fun Activities for Teaching English booklet see above for instructions on doing role plays.

Or choose an interesting photo and have students write a short paragraph or dialogue based on what they see, then have them read the actual story.

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When tutoring students one-on-one, or doing conversational English lessons in a coffee shop, you can do many of these same activities with the travel and photography books that you almost always find in cafes and other hangout spots. PROS inexpensive, easy-to-find materials, genuine and meaningful content, nice photos, interesting for youth and adult learners, transferable to different levels and settings. One of the most popular places English learners go to practice their language skills are cafes. And they may make the journey several times in one week. Most of the time, people will begin coming to The Rock because of the opportunity for language practice, but they continue to come—night after night—because of something more.

Some people continue to come purely because of the relationships they have made there, and some come in search of spiritual truth. And there are a lot of cafes like this one that are currently being operated by missionaries all around the world, because they are such good environments for making friendships and sharing biblical truths—night after night.

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Two of our favorites are called International Discovery and God Loves The Outcast, both of which have been created by—and for—missionaries and church planters in Asia. Either of these could be done in a number of different settings: And they are wonderful if you want to add an element of evangelism or real discipleship to your English classes. International Discovery is a set of Conversational English worksheets that you can print, two per page, and hand out to the students at your table.

Each lesson begins by practicing language that students need for communicating in everyday situations. The lessons are also centered around a cultural story that discusses culture in Asia.

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And every lesson is designed to lead into an encouraging story from the Bible. The transition is typically subtle, so teachers can decide whether or not to incorporate biblical truths into their lesson, and how much. Most lessons provide wonderful opportunities for sharing personal testimonies and stories from the Bible. God Loves The Outcast is a set of 40 lesson plans complete with flashcards and materials, and each lesson teaches English through telling Bible stories.

The curriculum is designed to be spread out over 14 weeks with three lessons per week, however the schedule could easily be modified as a yearlong course with one lesson per week. Each lesson focuses on some form of language practice, including new vocabulary, pronunciation, and simple grammar points. Then the lessons include listening, reading, and speaking practice that centers on a story from the bible. The curriculum moves chronologically through the Bible with a new story introduced every week, which makes this a great resource for teaching basic Bible Overview to receptive English students.

That is what makes this resource so wonderful for church planters looking for a more intentional way to bring the Bible into their lessons and make real disciples along the way. This curriculum is designed for adults from a high beginner to low intermediate level, and includes a lot of reading, but you can make it suitable for lower levels by simplifying the Bible passages and replacing some of the reading requirements with listening activities.

By doing this, it also makes a decent English-through-the-Bible curriculum for children, and the lesson plans have been written in a simple format that makes it easy for anyone to pick up a lesson and teach. PROS complete lesson plans provided, teaches the Bible at the same time, great for discipling and church planting, no other materials needed, free downloadable content. Sometimes, nothing beats a good textbook. When it comes to establishing professional English classes at your school, cafe, or other ministry location, nice-looking textbooks will add some sizeable style points to your program.

But one of the biggest benefits to using textbooks in all of your classes is the progression students experience when moving from one level to the next. When students complete one book they are ready to move onto the next, and with each new level they receive a feeling of accomplishment while maintaining the familiarity of a common curriculum across all levels. If students know what to expect when they come to class, their learning actually improves, and the repetitive rhythms of textbooks makes this easy. So we try to make our lessons come alive by adding a few fun activities to keep the students active and interested in the material, and we tend to build a lesson centered around content from the textbook, as well as an occasional newspaper or magazine article to keep your lesson up-to-date and meaningful to your students.

Copyright laws will generally keep you from photocopying pages out of your textbooks, however, as long as you have a single copy of each book in a set of curriculum, you can gain a lot of great ideas from those textbooks regarding which topics to focus on, which vocabulary and grammar to practice with your students, and what that all might look like.

Then you can fairly easily take that inspiration and craft your own lessons that follow a very intelligent path through all of the different levels, with plenty of room and freedom to make your lessons fit your own context and worldview. For the cost of a few textbooks and a stack of blank lesson plan templates you can easily and cheaply design your own curriculum.

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One set of textbooks we highly recommend for teaching high school and university-level students is the Smart Choice curriculum designed by Oxford University Press. Each level of books is split up into similar looking units; each page of the unit focuses on a different language skill, such as learning new vocabulary or practicing speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

And teachers and students are able to logon to the Oxford University Press website and practice grammar and vocabulary through fun online games—great for assigning homework to a tutored student, or setting up a computer lab station in your classroom. One of our favorite things to do is teaching English and Bible Stories to children. Kids love learning in hands-on interactive ways, they have bright imaginations, and they are always open to hearing the Good News about Jesus. Kids also love to have fun, and when you make the gospel message fun and exciting for them, they will tell their families and the whole world what they have learned.

See our Fun Activities for Teaching English for a list of great activities for children. But kids also love making stuff. And anything you can offer to children that will let them be creative and make something artistic or edible will be a good idea to include in your lesson. That is where coloring pages come in. There are many professionally-made books out there, on many different topics, and each one is filled with tens or hundreds of different coloring pages.

But in classes with mixed ages, sometimes all you need is a few coloring pages and some stickers to keep the lower half of the class busy while you pay attention to the needs of the upper half. PROS perfect for teaching children, reinforces Bible stories, great for holidays, reproducible content. At last count, nearly 2 billion people worldwide use smartphones, and millions more have tablets and other devices that can access the internet at anyplace and anytime.

One of our favorite activities for older students, both in the U. In this fun activity, groups of students work together to find items and complete tasks on a scavenger hunt list, and they take photos of whatever they find as proof that they completed that task. There are a lot of fun and interesting ways you can incorporate technology into your lesson, this is really just the beginning. They are, as my colleague Zoe Ann Stoltz says, the closest thing we have to a time machine.

Looking for ideas on how to use these with your students? Here is a past post about activities I conducted with third through fifth graders in a gifted and talented class. Looking for more inspiration? Edsitement has more suggestions for you. Posted by Martha Kohl No comments: Links to this post Email This BlogThis!

Tuesday, December 4, Montanans respond to climate change. Did you know that " Since , Montana temperatures have warmed 2. So how are Montanans responding? The Montana Climate Assessment website begins to answer that question. If you are interested in climate change or teach about human-environmental interaction, this site is golden. It includes information on both on how climate change is affecting Montana AND information on how Montanans are dealing with it.

For example, check out this six-minute video on climate change and flooding , and how the Musselshell community worked together to respond to the Musselshell River's flood and rebuild infrastructure based on data. Or this six-minute video on how climate change is affecting agriculture and ways farmers and ranchers are adapting.

Or read about how entomologist Diana Six is thinking about climate change and what it should mean for forest management practices. Here are a few other resources on climate change's affects in Montana. Tuesday, November 27, Do your students struggle with reading the textbook? Two summers ago, the Montana Historical Society invited Dr. Tammy Elser, who teaches in the education department at Salish Kootenai College SKC , to give a workshop on helping students and especially struggling readers read and understand informational text. It was one of the best workshops I have ever attended and I have been integrating the strategies I learned that day into almost every lesson or unit plan I've written since.

We filmed the workshop and Tammy, with the help of colleagues like Christy Mock-Stutz at the Montana Office of Public Instruction, transformed the workshop into a four credit, self-paced online course for the Teacher Learning Hub. Targeted at teachers of fourth through eighth grade, the course uses Montana: It was certainly information I found useful. While you are there, you may want to check out some of their other offerings. Tuesday, November 20, Time Travel: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Binkerton Twins would travel back in time, and it was never what they expected for example, they became serfs, rather than a lord and lady, when they visited the Middle Ages and they were shocked by the hard work and poor living conditions. Perhaps that's why I was smitten by this activity from one of my favorite social studies bloggers, Russell Tarr: The class should then produce a travel brochure designed to persuade holidaymakers about all the wonderful things to expect if they take a time-travelling vacation.

I, of course, started thinking about how the activity could be applied to Montana. Then tourists could complain about the lack of fresh fruit , being forced to push their stagecoach out of the mud, or the tedium of a steamboat voyage. These time traveler assignments are good examples of RAFT writing.

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RAFT stands for role, audience, format, topic. In a RAFT assignment students take on a R ole in this case, promotional travel agent or unhappy customer , and write for an A udience potential customer or misleading travel agent , adopt a F ormat brochure or letter , and focus on a T opic life in the assigned place and historical era. What Tarr's assignment does so well though is insisting that students take on two roles, one that looks at the positive and one that looks at the negative. I can imagine this dual approach beyond his original time travel tourism trope.

Resources for Teaching English Overseas - YWAM Montana

For example, fliers recruiting homesteaders or men to work in the Butte mines matched by letters home from miners or homesteaders. Or letters from the same miner or homesteader--one back to family members during the journey anticipating the opportunities to be found and another after they had settled in.

Or in the case of homesteading, one during the wet years and the other during the drought. There are lots of possibilities here, so I hope you take it and run. If you do, I'd love to hear how you used it and how your students responded. Footlockers are free to order, except for the cost of sending the trunk on to the next user.

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