Year: 2014

Now that desk warming season is in full swing, I hope you were able to keep busy last week with the 5 productive activities to do at school during your free time. This week I have 5 more activities to share with you to prevent your brain from turning to mush during this long and lonely time at school.

This is life. Full of heartache and loss and compromise and sacrifice and exhaustion and selfishness and jealousy and hurt. None of that changes because you decide to buy a plane ticket. Waste still collides with ceiling fans. Difficult times still come. And there are healthy ways to deal with hard times, regardless of location.

In desk warming season it would be easy to just watch an endless marathon of movies and Youtube videos. In fact, this is what most teachers tend to prefer doing. Instead of letting my brain mush out for weeks on New Girl reruns and Facebook stalking, I prefer to stay busy and keep my mind occupied during this extra free time. I’m going to share with you 10 things I like to do during desk warming season to help keep me busy, active, and happy.

Today’s article is written for the Reach To Teach Teach Abroad Blog Carnival, a monthly series that focuses on providing helpful tips and advice to ESL teachers around the globe. The host for this month is ‘Internationally In Debt’ here you can find other similar articles. I’ll be posting a new ESL related article to this blog on the 5th of every month. Check back for more articles, and if you’d like to contribute to next month’s Blog Carnival, please get in touch with me at dean@reachtoteachrecruiting.com, and I’ll let you know how you can start participating!

My friend, James, has chickens named after Star Wars characters. Aside from the best eggs I’ve ever eaten, Darth Sidious and her fellow hen lords are schooling me in all sorts of life’s truths. Especially as a teacher needing tips in classroom management.

Taiwan’s Yellow Duck (as it is called in Taiwan) is an 18 meter-tall (59 feet) replica of a classic rubber ducky that looks like the one you might have played with in the bathtub as a kid. It inflates and floats in the harbor of big cities and creates crowding and mass hysteria.

Whatever reservations you may have, set them aside and book them online instead. There are some pretty sweet apps out there to make your traveling a smoother, richer, more meaningful experience. I’ll go ahead and save you the suspense now. These essential travel apps are FREE.

We have all been there, we have started our year with awesome games, but as the months draw on these awesome games start to lose their zing with your students. Time to shake it up a little, below I have compiled the top 8 games every ESL teacher should know.