C4T#1

A Journey in TEFL

For the past two weeks, I have had the pleasure of viewing and commenting on the blog A Journey in TEFL by Eva Buyuksimkesyan. Not only did the blog contain many great ideas for ESL and EFL students, but it also had great ideas that could be incorporated for any classroom setting. The two blog posts that I commented on were 4 New First Week Activities and Some Oldies and Cool Sites and Tools for ESL & EFL Learners.

4 New First Week Activities and Some Oldies

On September 6, 2014, Ms. Buyuksimkesyan made a post with a creative idea for the first week of school. In the post, she tells her plan to get students to mingle and engage in conversation with each other by starting an activity with post-it notes and poster boards. The activity basically allows students to give an introduction of themselves through pictures and adjectives to describe themselves. The activity concludes with students getting a partner and allowing the partner to introduce them.

I felt that this idea was a great way to get students to open up to each other and to me as an educator. I thanked Ms. Buyuksimkesyan for sharing and told her that I definitely plan to implement this idea into my classroom. I love this concept because it gives students a sense of pride in their different backgrounds and uniqueness. This is a very creative way to get students to engage in the classroom, as well as get to know their classmates.

Cool Sites and Tools for ESL & EFL Learners

On September 10, 2014, I read another post on the blog site. The second blog post was a very resourceful post that contained many sites for students and teachers that help with increasing English vocabulary words. I visited the sites that she mentioned, but my favorite sites were 5 Minute English and One Word. In my comment, I told Ms. Buyuksimkesyan that I enjoyed her post, I explained the struggle that my younger sister had trying to learn English, and I thanked her for providing such great resources. For a student trying to learn the English language, it can be extremely difficult. I found the post extremely informative and helpful for teachers that may have students with a smaller vocabulary than most. I also love the fact that she incorporated Pinterest into her list of sites because it was a very familiar site to me and probably a large number of other educators and future educators. I never thought to use it to actually organize ways to teach my students. GENIUS!