I have this fantastic class on a Monday and Tuesday afternoon; the AEP (Advanced English Programme), or the “anglophones” are they are known to the rest of the school. This is when all the native English speakers, the kids whose parents think they are English mother tongue, and a handful of really motivated L2 speakers get together to do…

…whatever we want!

Well, whatever I want actually. There’s no official programme, no end of year exam, as long as nobody or nothing is damaged then we can do what we like to improve ourEnglish and learn about the world.

As you can imagine, it’s a fun class to teach, we’ve done lots of stuff this year, here’s the programme I “followed” this year. The final production was a group project on the subject of their choice.

After choosing a subject that interested them and researching some answers they studied different ways of producing their newly discovered information; this is where Joe Dale’s great talk at IATEFL’s YL pre-sig event came in very useful, he presented variety of apps that I have previously mentioned.

you can see Joe’s IATEFL interview here and follow him on twitter here.

There are loads of advantages to using apps like the ones Joe presented in the classroom, not only are students motivated and the lessons “fun” , but for me one of the best things is that I’m able to publish fantastic student work without having to worry about privacy issues.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

As this class is for all the students aged 9-15 some of them will be with us for the next six years if they are lucky!! This is even better as it encourages me to try new stuff all the time, no risk of repeating something we did last year.

As for next year’s programme, in our last lesson I asked all the students to fill out a syllabus sheet for me; individually or in groups they filled in the year’s 36 x2hours of lessons on a grid, with explanations and links where necessary. I can’t wait to find out what we’ll be doing!