Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

 Every so often I run a subscriber survey for my site, using the feedback to inform future resources. One thing that came back from my last survey is that teachers actually don’t notice many of the new additions to the site. This is not that surprising, since we often stick with tried-and-tested materials and don’t actively seek out new types of resources. So, in a blatant effort of marketing, I want to point out some of the new materials I have added in the last couple of years. Firstly, over the summer of 2023, I added a large number of starter activities, usually in the form of PowerPoint slides. These can be found in the Y7/Primary, Y8 and Y9 pages. They often involve the very fashionable retrieval practice principle so would work well for departments who have a policy of starting all lessons with a retrieval starter. In actual fact, these starters can be used as fillers, plenaries, or just as part of a lesson sequence.The full list of these can be found in the Contents pages ...

The summer begins to wind down. We have been moving home to London (yep, it is a bit stressful), entertaining friends at our French house, plus... I have been writing material for the A-level book I am working on with Steve Glover. An idea I came up with (I doubt very muh it is original) is a timeline information gap task. I've shared an example below which I posted on frenchteacher.net. You could apply the same principle to various topics: women's emancipation, the reunification of Germany, the Alagerian War, and so on. These dates and notes can be instantly prodiced by Chat GPT, so there is minimal prep, barring a check of the facts, since Chat GPT is better at language generation than facts. (Though, on the whole, I find it to be pretty good.) Here is the example - key dates in the Second World war from the French perspective. Les dates clés de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale du point de vue de la France Instructions  Students work in pairs. Each partner has a list of 6 imp...