Last week, I wrote my New Years Teaching Resolutions. One of them was to “share my lesson plans with other teachers in a consistent and organized way.”  There are so many ways to share links and drinks, but what about our favorite worksheets? Mine usually stay hidden away somewhere on my computer or worse yet in a file cabinet in my office. I hate the idea that I spend hours creating handouts for my class and they rarely get used again. Sometimes, I give them to other teachers. Most of the time, we share hard copies, which is such a pain if you want to edit something.

So this year, my goal is to share more and share better. I want to share the electronic copies of all of my lessons. I have a few ideas of how to go about it. I could start putting them all on my personal website. I could use another website. Something with a community feature would be great so that I can easily get lessons too.

So far, I have two ideas: connexions, or a wiki. The first is something I stumbled upon today, but it might be worth looking into. Wikis, on the other hand, I am familiar with. I have used a wiki to share lessons before. Last time, I used a wiki to share pronunciation lessons with other interested parties. People shared things, but they rarely posted lessons. So I am going to have to give the first one a try and maybe look for something better. Do you have any ideas?

Throw away whatever you have planned for today! Unless you have something Halloween-themed planned. You MUST take advantage of the holiday today and use it to introduce your students to a little bit of culture and fun!

Since it is such short notice, I am going to give you three good links to websites where you can download Halloween-themed worksheets and activities for free.

The first link is to ESL-Kids. You might not teach kids, but this website lets you create a worksheet, flashcards with pictures, word finds, bingo, board games and more. Just pick the Halloween vocabulary theme and select the exact words you want to use and print it out. Awesome!

The second handy Halloween resource is from English Raven. There you can find cards to play fun Halloween role-play activities and more word finds and flashcards.

The third website has reading activities that students can do online, but you could also modify and print them. In fact, the page has a lot of Halloween resources. Maybe because it is titled ESL and Halloween.

If you don’t have time to print out any of these handouts or games, consider handing out candy (a Halloween tradition) or doing something with scary stories. You could make one up as a class. You could read a scary story as a listening activity or students could write their own. No matter what you do today, don’t forget that it is a holiday…so have fun!