
When you buy ebooks through the Kindle store or iBooks or a similar marketplace, you can open and read them quite easily. However, when you download epubs from a website like ours, you have to download a program or import them to your usual ebook reader. Here’s a list of programs that allow you to read ebooks on your PC, Mac, tablet, or phone. This is by no means a comprehensive list! Please share your favorite EPUB or ebook readers in the comments! Adobe Digital Editions: Works on Windows and Macs as well as iPhones and Android Phones.
This 100+ page “Gift of the Magi” lesson and activity plan packet has taken me years to compile! I’m pretty proud of it! “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry is without a doubt one of my favorite short stories, especially for the Christmas season. I’ve been teaching it to my students for years, and now I’ve compiled 15 different “The Gift of the Magi” lesson plans, activities, and resources for you. It’s 108 pages of activities, handouts and worksheets that cover vocabulary, irony, the moral of the story, character analysis, close reading, critical reading skills, and a lot more.
I love Halloween as a teacher and also in general! So I’m really excited to share some of my go-to scary stories for English students. I love scary stories and students love them too! They’re especially fun to share around Halloween as a way to build atmosphere. I find the best scary stories for the English classroom need to be short and written fairly simply. But they should keep some of the Halloween-specific words, too. They also can’t be too gory or terrifying. The scary part should really come from the suspense. So they need to have a twist.
Looking for an easy way to create a PowerPoint presentation from Excel? This method works great to merge data from Excel to PowerPoint. It’s a simple way to create flashcards, award certificates, project reports, any kind of presentation where you want to create multiple slides with the same kind of information on each. I also talk about using the Master Slide View to create your own PPT themes and formatting. Watch the video to learn how to Merge Data from Excel to PowerPoint Step by Step: Merge Data from Excel to PowerPoint 1. Create an Excel document and create
We know we aren’t the first and we probably won’t be the last people you hear from to talk about our resources for distance learning (or that work well teaching online). But we assume if you’re reading this blog, or getting this email that means you like what we do. And we certainly like what we do and think they’re pretty useful. Now when I say resources for distance learning, I mean a few different things. First, it could mean resources that are well-suited for online learning platforms like Zoom or Google Classrooms. Some of our resources are on
As more and more teachers are turning to online teaching and distance learning for the forseeable future, and students may be considering self-study options, I’d like to introduce our free prompt generating tool, English Prompts, with three different kinds of prompts: creative writing, speaking, and role-plays. The first, Stories Without End, generates a random short story prompt that ends on a cliff-hanger. The genres vary from horror to comedy to sci-fi to realistic fiction, so there’s a broad range of topics. Don’t like the story? Click “New Story”! Here are some ideas to use it with students: Have students
A recent post on Patrice’s blog about time management made me stop and think. Like many in the education business, I never feel like I have enough time to do all my work. And then there’s everything else that needs to be done outside of work: paying bills, keeping the house and yard up, laundry, cooking, family time! So I always feel guilty when I do anything fun. I admit that I enjoy computer games from time to time, particularly Pokémon Go and Minecraft. Now I console myself that playing Pokémon Go gets me some exercise and it’s also
I was recently uploading more individual stories without end (from Taylor’s wonderful book) to Teachers Pay Teachers. One of the pieces of information you need to fill out there is how long the material will take to use. Well, the stories are designed to be adaptable so they can be used in one class period, or stretched out over several periods. There are a lot of ways to use Stories Without End in the classroom. Obviously timing depends on the length of the story as well as the level of your learners, and how fast they read. In addition,
You’ll never be able to pronounce my name,” the student from Uzbekistan said. Little did she know I had lived in Kazakhstan for several years and the two languages are very similar. Nor was her name really all that difficult, just long. “Is it Zulfizar Abduraimova (not her real name)?”I pronounced her name fairly well, I think. She was floored. It was a small thing, pronouncing a student’s name correctly. It had extra impact because you don’t see a lot of Uzbek students in the US and it’s not a popular destination for Americans, either. Of all the English
I am having way too much fun uploading worksheets out of 60 Positive Activities for Kids on to our Teachers Pay Teachers Store (Click on Build Positivity to find all the worksheets!) One of the things I’m really enjoying is that it gives me a chance to think deeply about how to use the resources in the classroom. As I was uploading this awesome New Holiday Activity I realized that this could be a one-off creative worksheet as the authors intended. But it could also spark a discussion comparing holiday traditions. You could even use it as the beginning