Here's a picture of my kids in class the other day showing me their shaped rubber bracelets. We start each new lesson now with them telling me about new additions to their collections. Not only do we go over words for the shapes, but I also encourage them to tell me why they like them, what they swapped them for and vote on a favourite one each lesson. 

I've always been very proud of my worksheet/photocopying skills. Managing to get all those little exercises on to a single worksheet to avoid a paper-heavy lesson. And then playing around with the layout of the actual worksheet. In this particular lesson students were supposed to work on a gap-fill. I didn't want them to look at the options for the gaps immediately, in order to get them thinking about the words that could go in each space, so I pasted the words on the back of the worksheet. Once they had read the gapped-text, students could turn over the worksheet to find words to go in the gaps. Actually, all they had to do was fold the bottom of the page upwards because I had very cunningly pasted the words upside down on the back. After a few minutes one of my boys started getting very frustrated because he thought it was a complete waste of time turning the page over back and forth - don't know why, but boys always have a hard time figuring out how this fold thing works - so he got out his phone, took a picture of the box of words & proceeded to finish the exercise.

* Bart Simpson chalkboard quote

I love handing over the whiteboard to my group of 6 year olds. We have our little routine each lesson in which I nominate a student to take attendance by writing on the board the names of the students who are present in the lesson. I've found that over the school year they have been using the board much more than I do. Here's an example of a lesson in which we were looking at house vocab. Eduardo suggested drawing their houses on the board. Once they illustrated "their neighbourhood", each child then came up to the board to describe their house to the rest of the group. 

Have been very busy preparing my presentation for the 25th Annual APPI Conference. This year's theme is 'Shaping the Future of ELT" & technology will certainly be playing a big part both in the conference and in what's to come in the world of ELT. My talk will be focussing on our 'digital natives' (yes I am am aware of the controversy around this term) and how we have to cater for their language needs in this digital age, creating meaningful contexts for language practise that are relevant to the world they live in.

I'm also looking forward to meeting up with my good friends Jeremy Harmer and Lindsay Clandfield - 2 very important members of my PLN.

Have a look at the conference programme here: http://www.appi.pt/act/congsemin/docs/25th_ConferencePG.pdf

My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
It is my custom to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me,
And what I see at each moment
Is what I never saw before,
And I’m very good at noticing things.
I’m capable of feeling the same wonder
A newborn child would feel
If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born. 
I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born
Into a completely new world…

I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.

I have no philosophy, I have senses…
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.

To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think…

1914, Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)