Posted in Recommended Websites

Amazy.uk – Materials Bank & Teaching Community

If you teach English online you might want to check out Amazy.uk – a collaborative resource library for education and training.

👩‍🏫 For teachers, you get access to a public library of thousands of original educational materials, all easily saved, customised, and shared. It makes it intuitive and easy to create your own interactive lesson materials with an AI assistant, self-checking tasks, audios, videos, and anything else in one place to keep your students engaged.

Share lessons with your students, keep track of their progress, and save time on lesson preparation and homework checking.

🧑‍🎓 Students will find themselves in the driver’s seat of their learning, with easy access to all covered materials, self-paced lessons, and an engaging learning environment.

🏫 Schools will benefit from a private resource library shared among teachers and students added to the team, a company dashboard to track progress and statistics, and many other features.

To get a taste of what the platform offers, here is a selection of popular lessons you can use in your class today:

1. St. Valentine’s Day A1 – https://amazy.uk/lessons/49732 

2. All Future Tenses B2 – https://amazy.uk/lessons/47531 

3. All Conditionals B2 – https://amazy.uk/lessons/4560 

4. Modal verbs – Ability A2 https://amazy.uk/lessons/15842 

Posted in Advanced C1, C1 Writing

C1 Advanced – Letter to the Editor

My C1 students recently completed a mock writing exam in class and I realised some glaring flaws in their approach to the task. The main issues I observed were a lack of planning which led to a lack of coherence in their arguments and no logical throughline. So I designed this activity based on a model answer to offer them some more support.

Students will analyse a model answer to the task, then try to reverse engineer the writer’s plan/brainstorm. They will then focus on useful language for the task and then repeat the planning phase for a similar task. The idea is to model what I expect students to do in the first 5 minutes of the exam: plan out what they want to express then brainstorm advanced language to express it.

Download the student handout and teacher’s notes below:

Posted in Proficiency, Proficiency Reading & UoE

C2: Reading & Vocabulary – My Friend Kevin

This is a lesson plan designed for C2 students in which they read a text about a man and his impulsive friend Kevin. It’s designed for students preparing for Cambridge C2 Proficiency exam as it offers some exam practice for reading part 7 and introduces some expressions that may appear in use of English part 4. Download the student handout and answer key below:

The lesson procedure is pretty straightforward:

  1. Pre-reading: students are introduced to the characters and predict what might happen in the story.
  2. Gist reading: students read the text quickly to check if their predictions were correct.
  3. Detailed reading/exam practice: students read again and complete the reading part 7 task.
  4. Vocabulary focus: students discuss the meaning of the expressions in bold, make a note of them and then test each other.
  5. Recall: students turn the handout over and attempt to recall the expressions using version 2 as a prompt. This replicates what they’re required to do in use of English part 4.
  6. Part 4 practice: students cover the text and attempt the key word transformation questions. Alternatively, these could be set for homework.
  7. React & Extend: students react to the text and attempt to continue it with their ideas about what Kevin and the narrator got up to next.