A Sporting Chance – The sticky wicket of sports-inspired idioms

A Sporting Chance is a workshop I’m presenting on Sunday 25th March 2012 at the ABS conference ‘Challenge Your English’ – a conference for non-native teachers of English to boost the level of their own English.

Handout A Sporting Chance

ABS Challenge Your English

Slides A Sporting Chance

The workshop focuses on English idioms from the world of sports, starting with sailing, then baseball, cricket, cards and finally a free-for-all called guess the sport.

As they are introduced to the idioms, the teachers play sports themselves which can be used in the classroom.

Abstract:

Do you find yourself behind the eight ball when idioms come out of left field?  Are you out of your depth when idiom-loving friends call the shots? Give yourself a sporting chance to cover all the bases as we dive headfirst into the world of sport-inspired idioms, exploring their meaning and background to give ourselves the inside track in the idiom race, allowing us to paddle our own idiom canoes and put a new vocabulary arrow in our language quivers.

Very Professionally Developing

Click here for slides IHBsAsProfessionallyDeveloping

I was asked to give a workshop today for the teachers at International House Recoleta and Belgrano based on the talk I did at the ABS Conference for Coordinators back in August.  Since I was confident they are already doing lots of the development ideas I addressed in the original talk, I wanted to attempt to make it a more personal and specific experience by adding in more interactive tasks and giving them summaries of the different tools on a plate, so to speak.

I enjoyed the journey they took me on and a lot of interesting ideas came out of it.  Hopefully some of them will go on to discover Suggestopedia in an experimental practice lesson or do some Action Research to improve their FCE learners listening skills.  Or at the very least they’ll come and comment on my blog.

Enjoy the slides and the handouts and I hope they help you to decide where to take your own Continuous Professional Develoment next.

Click here for the handouts  Professionally Developing

My slowest, shortest Fast – an achievement all the same

Fast by mcneilmahon at Garmin Connect – Details.

Seems a bit odd to call last night’s run a fast one since I averaged around 6:30/km, not to mention the fact I only ran 5.3k.  But this all just goes to show how far I went and how far behind I now am.  The important thing is I managed to run 5k as fast as I can now without giving up and without injuring myself.

I managed to go 8 days without a run beforehand, which wasn’t part of the plan.  I need to be stricter with the days when Mer can’t run and go anyway.  The Nike 10k is only 10 days away now and I’ve only managed to run half the distance.  I need to go out every other day between now and the race, which is doable: Friday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday and try and get up to at least 8k during these races.  It will actually be fun to not have run 10k before the big day, a long way away from the days of running 20k three days before a 10k race, but then it was overdoing it like that that got me injured and where I’m at now anyway.

Today the foot doctor, tomorrow the knee doctor.  Let’s hope they give me the all clear and I can continue the comeback.

Last night’s thoughts: what do I have to do nd when do I have to do it.  Professionally Developing talk for IH Recoleta?belgrano on Friday, needs to be finished off tomorrow.  It’s going to be completely different to the times I’ve done it before in Mexico and ABS, since the audience will have heard of almost if not all the means of developing, so it’s gonna be more of a refelction on what suits each of us best.

Feedback Fiesta for Montevideo on the 19th November.  Again, very different since a three hour talk instead of an hour.  Lots more time to focus on error correction and separate out the three types of feedback and look at each in more detail.  Will need quite a bit of work mind to get it ready, though that will have to wait until the weekend after next, since this weekend is dedicated to preparing for the first IH Teachers Online Conference on Friday 25th November.  Really exciting project, I just hope the teachers hear about it and decide to come share with us.

Professionally Developing

Here are the slides from the workshop I’ve just given at the ABS Conference for Coordinators and Directors of Studies in Buenos Aires.  It’s an overview of different things teachers can do, or coordinators can encourage their teachers to do, in order to continue to develop either individually or as a school, incrementally or taking giant steps, face2face or online.

Enjoy the ideas and please share your favourite ways of continuing your professional development and let us know how you get on with putting some of these ideas into practice.

And a special thanks to all those who tweeted us from home and abroad during the session!

Coordinating against the clock

Coordinating Against The Clock Powerpoint slides

Coordinating against the clock Handout

Coordinating against the clock was a workshop on time management that I gave at the ABS Intermational Conference for Coordinators and Directors of Studies in Buenos Aires in 2008.  The workshop looks at planning your to do lists, how to stop procrastinating, how to deal with your inbox efficiently and how to avoid needless interruptions.

As always, I post it here as it was originally presented and I hope to update it with new ideas when I get the chance.  Please help with the reworking by adding your comments and questions about the slides and handout.  I hope you find the materials helpful.

 

The Drill Bit

The Drill Bit was a workshop I presented first off at the ABS International Conference for the Professional Development of Teachers in February 2009.  I repeated it as an International House Teachers Workshop at IH Belgrano during induction week that March.

Some of us love drilling and some of us hate it, but every student I’ve ever taught (and they must be reaching four figures by now) has appreciated a bit of judicious drilling at some point in their learning careers.

I’m a big fan, are you?

Enjoy the activities, do the poll and drop me a line with your ideas about drilling.  Take care.

The Drill Bit – Click here for handout

Metaphor Magic

Metaphor Magic Powerpoint Slides

This was a workshop I did at the ABS International Challenge Your English Conference in 2006.  The theme of the conference is to help Englaish Language teachers in South America improve their own English in order to help their students improve theirs.

In this workshop we focused on the power of metaphor and through a variety of activties the participants improved their colloquial and idomatic use of English and also their ability to use and create their own metaphoric language.

Enjoy the slides and handout available above and I’ll be back soon with some reworkings of this workshop in the form of new ideas and teaching suggestions about metaphor.  And of course if you have any ideas, questions and suggestions to share, please just leave a comment.

Metaphor Magic Click here for handout