A Montanans Tales of Teaching and Travelling
Many lives have been transformed forever—both inside and outside of the classroom—because of a relationship that started with a simple English lesson. These resources are geared for the outreach team preparing an English Camp, or the solitary missionary who finds him or herself in an English classroom with little or no training, zero time for preparation, and fresh faces looking on in anticipation.
Resources for Teaching English Overseas - YWAM Montana
Many have found themselves in your shoes at one time or another. Fear not—you can do this! Especially with endless help and strength from our wonderful Lord. God, your God, is with you every step you take. You can use these activities in youth gatherings, business meetings, bible studies, and cultural exchange camps. This resource consists of more than 60 proven activities that offer folks a chance to practice their English with you, while having fun at the same time.
And having fun together is really the best starting point for making relationships. We like to photocopy this into little half-paged booklets that all of our DTS students can keep on them during outreach. The activities inside can be added to existing English lessons to make your curriculum come alive. These will also help you as you look for ways to make your lessons more active and engaging for everyone in the group. I keep a copy of mine in the iBooks library on my phone, just in case. PROS builds relationships, minimal materials required, transferable to different levels and settings, fun for all ages, perfect size for outreach, free downloadable content.
As you hand the stewardess your boarding pass and walk through the doors of the airport gate you walk past a tall metal stand that has a few shelves filled with complimentary newspapers. As you find your seat on the plane you take a quick look at the headline. You just found the textbook for your first English lesson. Most classrooms have textbooks and other materials that are several years old. In addition to this, not every school has the ability to buy beautiful, expensive textbooks for their students.
However, there are often wonderful resources located all around us—you only need to look around. Typically, students will be more engaged with a well-made lesson that uses content from their favorite magazine, than a lesson from the fanciest of textbooks. So, how do you add this content to your lesson? For a simple reading activity, choose an article and have students look at any pictures, titles, or captions in the article. And then do a fun role play based on the people and events from the article. Find activities A3 and A4 in our Fun Activities for Teaching English booklet see above for instructions on doing role plays.
Or choose an interesting photo and have students write a short paragraph or dialogue based on what they see, then have them read the actual story. When tutoring students one-on-one, or doing conversational English lessons in a coffee shop, you can do many of these same activities with the travel and photography books that you almost always find in cafes and other hangout spots.
PROS inexpensive, easy-to-find materials, genuine and meaningful content, nice photos, interesting for youth and adult learners, transferable to different levels and settings. One of the most popular places English learners go to practice their language skills are cafes. And they may make the journey several times in one week. Most of the time, people will begin coming to The Rock because of the opportunity for language practice, but they continue to come—night after night—because of something more. Some people continue to come purely because of the relationships they have made there, and some come in search of spiritual truth.
And there are a lot of cafes like this one that are currently being operated by missionaries all around the world, because they are such good environments for making friendships and sharing biblical truths—night after night. Two of our favorites are called International Discovery and God Loves The Outcast, both of which have been created by—and for—missionaries and church planters in Asia.
Either of these could be done in a number of different settings: And they are wonderful if you want to add an element of evangelism or real discipleship to your English classes. International Discovery is a set of Conversational English worksheets that you can print, two per page, and hand out to the students at your table.
Each lesson begins by practicing language that students need for communicating in everyday situations. The lessons are also centered around a cultural story that discusses culture in Asia. And every lesson is designed to lead into an encouraging story from the Bible. The transition is typically subtle, so teachers can decide whether or not to incorporate biblical truths into their lesson, and how much. Most lessons provide wonderful opportunities for sharing personal testimonies and stories from the Bible.
God Loves The Outcast is a set of 40 lesson plans complete with flashcards and materials, and each lesson teaches English through telling Bible stories. The curriculum is designed to be spread out over 14 weeks with three lessons per week, however the schedule could easily be modified as a yearlong course with one lesson per week. Each lesson focuses on some form of language practice, including new vocabulary, pronunciation, and simple grammar points.
Then the lessons include listening, reading, and speaking practice that centers on a story from the bible. The curriculum moves chronologically through the Bible with a new story introduced every week, which makes this a great resource for teaching basic Bible Overview to receptive English students. That is what makes this resource so wonderful for church planters looking for a more intentional way to bring the Bible into their lessons and make real disciples along the way.
This curriculum is designed for adults from a high beginner to low intermediate level, and includes a lot of reading, but you can make it suitable for lower levels by simplifying the Bible passages and replacing some of the reading requirements with listening activities. By doing this, it also makes a decent English-through-the-Bible curriculum for children, and the lesson plans have been written in a simple format that makes it easy for anyone to pick up a lesson and teach.
PROS complete lesson plans provided, teaches the Bible at the same time, great for discipling and church planting, no other materials needed, free downloadable content. Sometimes, nothing beats a good textbook. When it comes to establishing professional English classes at your school, cafe, or other ministry location, nice-looking textbooks will add some sizeable style points to your program. But one of the biggest benefits to using textbooks in all of your classes is the progression students experience when moving from one level to the next.
When students complete one book they are ready to move onto the next, and with each new level they receive a feeling of accomplishment while maintaining the familiarity of a common curriculum across all levels. If students know what to expect when they come to class, their learning actually improves, and the repetitive rhythms of textbooks makes this easy. So we try to make our lessons come alive by adding a few fun activities to keep the students active and interested in the material, and we tend to build a lesson centered around content from the textbook, as well as an occasional newspaper or magazine article to keep your lesson up-to-date and meaningful to your students.
Copyright laws will generally keep you from photocopying pages out of your textbooks, however, as long as you have a single copy of each book in a set of curriculum, you can gain a lot of great ideas from those textbooks regarding which topics to focus on, which vocabulary and grammar to practice with your students, and what that all might look like.
Then you can fairly easily take that inspiration and craft your own lessons that follow a very intelligent path through all of the different levels, with plenty of room and freedom to make your lessons fit your own context and worldview. For the cost of a few textbooks and a stack of blank lesson plan templates you can easily and cheaply design your own curriculum. One set of textbooks we highly recommend for teaching high school and university-level students is the Smart Choice curriculum designed by Oxford University Press.
- 7 Resources for Teaching English Overseas.
- EMIT (THE EMIT SERIES Book 1);
- Search This Blog;
Each level of books is split up into similar looking units; each page of the unit focuses on a different language skill, such as learning new vocabulary or practicing speaking, listening, reading, and writing. And teachers and students are able to logon to the Oxford University Press website and practice grammar and vocabulary through fun online games—great for assigning homework to a tutored student, or setting up a computer lab station in your classroom. One of our favorite things to do is teaching English and Bible Stories to children.
Kids love learning in hands-on interactive ways, they have bright imaginations, and they are always open to hearing the Good News about Jesus. Kids also love to have fun, and when you make the gospel message fun and exciting for them, they will tell their families and the whole world what they have learned. See our Fun Activities for Teaching English for a list of great activities for children.
But kids also love making stuff. And anything you can offer to children that will let them be creative and make something artistic or edible will be a good idea to include in your lesson. That is where coloring pages come in. There are many professionally-made books out there, on many different topics, and each one is filled with tens or hundreds of different coloring pages. Perhaps that's why I was smitten by this activity from one of my favorite social studies bloggers, Russell Tarr: The class should then produce a travel brochure designed to persuade holidaymakers about all the wonderful things to expect if they take a time-travelling vacation.
I, of course, started thinking about how the activity could be applied to Montana. Then tourists could complain about the lack of fresh fruit , being forced to push their stagecoach out of the mud, or the tedium of a steamboat voyage. These time traveler assignments are good examples of RAFT writing. RAFT stands for role, audience, format, topic. In a RAFT assignment students take on a R ole in this case, promotional travel agent or unhappy customer , and write for an A udience potential customer or misleading travel agent , adopt a F ormat brochure or letter , and focus on a T opic life in the assigned place and historical era.
Teaching Montana History
What Tarr's assignment does so well though is insisting that students take on two roles, one that looks at the positive and one that looks at the negative. I can imagine this dual approach beyond his original time travel tourism trope. For example, fliers recruiting homesteaders or men to work in the Butte mines matched by letters home from miners or homesteaders. Or letters from the same miner or homesteader--one back to family members during the journey anticipating the opportunities to be found and another after they had settled in.
Or in the case of homesteading, one during the wet years and the other during the drought.
There are lots of possibilities here, so I hope you take it and run. If you do, I'd love to hear how you used it and how your students responded. Footlockers are free to order, except for the cost of sending the trunk on to the next user. All footlockers come with user guides that you can download even without ordering the trunk.
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The user guides contain lesson plans many of which can be used without ordering the footlocker and narratives written on a fourth grade level. So why bring a footlocker into your classroom? These traveling trunks are chock-full of interesting replicas, photographs, and artifacts that help bring history alive. Students of all ages absolutely love them. Here are a few of my favorites: Immigrants from Around the World. This footlocker showcases the culture, countries, traditions, and foodways of Montana's immigrants through reproduction clothing, toys, and activities.
Artifacts include a Hmong story cloth, Norwegian hardanger, Swedish rosette iron, Basque bones, a Hutterite dress, a Chinese Mahjong set, Catholic medallions, a German Protestant Bible and a Jewish Menorah, an Irish drum, and trowel of the type Croatian stone masons would have used, a Chinese hat, and more. Montana and World War II. This footlocker describes aspects of everyday life in Montana during the war years. Artifacts include military uniforms, a set of dog tags, propaganda posters, historic photographs, shadow boxes that display metals, ration coupons, and materials issued to servicemen and women, and more.
Home to the Stewart Family in Turbulent Times, This footlocker investigates life and politics, , as well as the history and architecture of a magnificent building. With historic games old maid, Parcheesi, and pick up sticks , Victrola records and a small model Victrola, calling cards and a calling card tray, a fully stocked sewing basket with a darning egg, embroidery scissors and hoop, a small braided rug and rag ball, napkin rings and cloth napkins, historic photos, and many more items, this footlocker is perfect for teaching what life was like for kids at the turn of the last century.
Oral History in the Classroom Mini Footlocker. One of the few footlockers designed for older students, this trunk includes eight Sony IC Audio Recorders, batteries and chargers, useful reference material, and detailed lesson plans for creating a classroom-based oral history project. You can view all of our footlockers, preview the user guides, and make reservations online. Contact Katie White at kwhite mt. Thanksgiving is so early this year! If you are looking for teaching ideas, check out these two past posts. She said, "These maps are wonderful and he gives a little discount for teachers.
They are pricey but very nice. Culture, History, and the Contemporary Community. There are two main sections: Culture, History, and Dance, and Music and Dance. Although it is from Canada the material is relevant to Montana as well. In addition to readings, links and lesson plans, it has a great list of picture books that librarians might want to consider for their libraries.