Z'report

         Hi folks! Today I'm going to share a very easy and fun activity for young learners. Identifying  shapes   is one of the first concepts that kids  learn . They distinguish among the different shapes  and categorize items according to t heir shapes. They find sha pes in  everyday items. So I prepared an authentic activity for shapes.  At the end  of this activity, s tudents will be able to recognize the characteristics of shapes and will be able to talk about the shapes of things.        Pair Work:     Students work in pairs. Give each pair  four pages including different shapes: circle, triangle, rectangle, square a nd lots of little object pictures mixed in a box. Cut those pictures before hand. Give your students very clear instructions that students are supposed to put those objects in the correct shape. Do no t forget to exemplify the activity on the board....

     Hello everyone! Today, I'm going to share an information gap activity which you can apply with your young learners. Information gap activities are very useful for speaking. Students need to interact with their partners in order to get the information of missing elements in their paper, or in their image. By collaborating, they complete a task together. At the end of this activity, students will be able to recognize the names of the parts of a house and they will be able to ask and tell about the location of things in a house.          All you need to get for the activity are:         Pictures, scissors, glue stick          Give your students  two different pictures of a living room with different missing elements. Students work in pairs. They find out those objects’ places by asking their partners: “Where is the c...

     “THE NECKLACE” AND “THE HAND-PUPPET” COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS         “How strangeness enters our lives” A woman with no expectations from life, feeling isolated from her family, her home, even from her own body goes through a psychological crisis after the morning her daughter shows up with a scary hand-puppet in the story of ‘the Hand-Puppet’. On the other side, there is another pretty and charming woman in the story of ‘the Necklace’ unsatisfied with her life, considers she deserves a better, luxurious life. She suffers the consequences of her obsession with looking wealthy and attractive when she loses the necklace which she borrows from her neighbor. Two different short stories which I expected to be children’s story because of their names have shocked me with their endings and psychological analysis. The use of complex words and going deep in characters’ minds shows that Guy de Maupassant and Joyce Carol Oates expect the implied readers are...

PARTS OF THE HOUSE    It's a listening and coloring activity for young learners (A1 starters) . It's a student directed activity which is accuracy oriented. Students need to get the meaning accurately to be able to colour the parts told in the audio. Procedure:    Distribute a handout which includes a house drawing to each student. Students are supposed to listen to the audio and colour the house parts accordingly. You should give clear instructions that they are going to listen the audio twice. If necessary, you can play the audio for the third time. Do not forget to give an example right after you give the instructions. Then play the audio and stop at the end of first part. The audio tells us to colour the bed purple. By pointing at the picture, tell your students “Can you see the purple bed? This is an example. Now, you listen and colour.”. Keep playing the audio. Students colour the house parts by listening to the audio. Then, check the answers with t...

   Vocabulary learning has always been challenging for most of the students. They are given a long list full of irrelevant words and they are expected to memorize all the words with their meanings in L1. If this is the way how we teach vocabulary, of course it will be a torture for our students. Why do we make this process so difficult? It is very simple to teach vocabulary by using some techniques. Today, I'll share those techniques, Dos and Don'ts with you. Let's dive into the subject!   First thing to be careful about teaching vocabulary is to provide a written or audio context . We should get students to spot unknown words in the text and tell them to guess the meanings from the context. While teaching action verbs like 'walk', 'run' and some adjectives, we can make use of facial expressions, actions and mimics.    It is the best to use real life objects, if possible, to point out the object but if it is not, we should draw on the board or bring som...

   WHAT IS A LEXICAL SET?     A lexical set (sometimes called a word set) is a cluster or group of related words. Words can be related in several differebt ways, for example: By topic:  furniture, clothes, family relationships, animals By similarity of meaning or synonyms: gorilla, chimpanzee, orang-urang, ape In pairs; a) Opposites in pairs: hot/cold, old/new, hard/soft b) Synonyms in pairs: slip/slide, rough/harsh, booklet/brochure Idioms:  black and white; black and blue In series of a scale: boiling, hot, warm, cool, cold, freezing By subordinates and hyponyms: Supeeordinate: fruit Hyponyms: orange, apple, pinapple, banana, strawberry By activity or process: steps in making a cake or building a bookcase Word families: paint, painter, painting, paint work OR know, knowledge, knowing, knowledgeable, known     WHY ARE LEXICAL SETS IMPORTANT?         We probably don't store words in our brains in alphabe...

    RING RING RING!    It is time to move to another world!    Today, we're going into the Virtual World of Second Life. I have learned about SL for the first time this year in the Instructional Technologies and Material Design course by Mr. Tuncer CAN and  I have been taking an online course provided by  Guinevere Project  for a while. I LOVE IT! There are lots of opportunities in the game. You can create or buy objects. For example in one of the courses, we created board games from scratch at the online course. I will give more detailed information about how to make use of Second Life and OpenSim later.     Now I want to tell Second Life to the ones who are not familiar with.  SL is a 3D virtual world, sometimes referred to as a multi-user virtual environment developed  by Linden Lab,  which allows its user to meet, interact socially and even manipulate the environment around them (Deutschmann & Panichi,...