Ordering food: good for practicing food vocabulary, ordering skills and basic computer skills

This is an activity that is inspired by Betsy's blog. Betsy posted an activity related to ordering shoes from the Nike site, and I thought an interesting related activity would be to order food online. This would be useful for practicing vegetable and meat vocabulary, since those are most of the toppings. Pizza Hut probably has the most straightforward site to use: the main page gives you a direct link to the online ordering page, and the directions are easy to follow from there. Domino's and Papa John's are a little more complicated: you would need to make sure your students click on the "Build your own pizza" option on the Domino's site and the "Create your own pizza" option on the Papa John's site. But these sites have the advantage of a much more fun and knowledge-cementing pizza-building experience: when you click on a topping, they fall onto a picture of the pizza.

As I said, this activity could be useful for practicing food vocabulary. It could also give students another tool to order food, since phone interactions are usually difficult. Speaking of phone interactions, an extension of this activity could be to call the pizza place and order a pizza once they are comfortable with all the options available online. Finally, I think these sites can be useful if your students are interested in improving their computer skills. Theses sites are easy to maneuver and the vocabulary should be pretty familiar to most adults in Community Ed classes (most people order pizza at some point and many of your students may have a Pizza Hut and Domino's in their home countries). It is a very practical activity, and students could maybe order a pizza for a class party.

Making E-cards: good for beginner students

This is an idea I found while looking at SparkEnthusiasm.com, a site Kaki listed on her blog. The makers of the site listed making e-cards as a way to practice Spanish, and I thought it would be useful for English as well. I think it could be great for true beginner students. You could help students figure out what goes into most greeting cards in the U.S., and then have them send each other cards. A site with free e-cards is 123 Greetings.

Some sites for using music in class

Here are some ways to find music to use in classes:

1. Musical English Lessons International, England- good for finding songs for grammar activities
This site seems very useful to me. It is arranged by grammatical category, and within each category are a few songs. When you click on a song, you get the grammatical activity related to that song plus other things you could practice with that song (different grammatical forms, pronunciation, spelling, etc.). I highly recommend this.

2.Songfacts- ok for finding songs for vocabulary activities
This site is limited in its usefulness, but it might be worth a shot. It categorizes songs based on what words they have in their title. So you can find songs with body parts or clothing or units of measurement, even, in the title. This is not an actual language learning website, though, and of course, having "sweater" in the title does not mean that the song will have clothing as its focus or list many different articles of clothing. However, this may be a good place to start looking. Also, it does not include the lyrics of the songs on the site, but those are easy enough to find on Google usually.

3. Isabel's ESL site- suggestions for activities that can go with different songs
This site has a list of popular songs, their lyrics and activities that could be done with each song. It might be somewhat time-consuming to go through all the songs to find one that deals with prepositions in the way you want it to, for example, but if you find that your students like a particular genre of music or a certain artist, this might be good.

4. Google and YouTube - finding songs for very specific words or structures
This might seem common sense, but it wasn't always to me. I was looking for songs specifically for "wanna" and "will" and I found two ways of doing this. With Google, I would type in the target word and then "lyrics", and several songs came up. For example, when I typed in "wanna lyrics", I found a Chris Brown song, a Spice Girls songs and an All-American Rejects song, along with others. With YouTube, I would type in the target word, and several songs would pop up. When I typed in "wanna", "wanna be a billionaire" by Travie McCoy and "wanna be a baller" by Lil Troy came up.

My purpose for this blog

The purpose for this blog is to provide resources to teachers working in ESL community education, especially teachers who have not had a lot of experience in this context. However, I imagine that the information in this blog could be useful to ESL or foreign language educators in general in a variety of contexts. My teaching context is an adult ESL night class in Texas. I love getting advice! I think the anecdotes and opinions of other teachers and students are the best resources in teaching. I would love your comments on the resources I post and definitely also on any personal accounts I put up as well. I definitely appreciate constructive criticism: my mindset right now is that I am learning to be a teacher, and I can very much use input from others. Any sort of well-thought out input is appreciated!

Welcome!

This blog is related to various aspects of teaching adult community education. I have just began teaching in this context, and I have realized what a unique challenge is. This blog will most especially reflect and respond to factors affecting the second language learning of these adults, particularly a busy life outside of class, strong motivation and limited prior schooling.

My hope for this blog is that it will be able to provide other teachers with resources to use in similar contexts. I plan for these resources to include activities and relevant personal anecdotes. I love hearing other people's opinions about these topics, so definitely leave comments if you have something to say!