ESL resources

How will pictures and illustrations help my students to learn?

 

  • Will pictures really keep my students talking?

 

  • Can students learn with pictures?

 

  • How will storytelling help my students remember vocabulary?

 

  • Does storytelling help students understand the deeper meaning of words?

 

Many teachers dislike it when students are reluctant to speak out of fear they’ll make a mistake. Teachers and leaders need to facilitate conversation and learning. We need to break the silence, get students talking, laughing and communicating.

 

Students who lack imagination, can’t think of a word, struggle to create full sentences… storytelling can help. 

 

There are students who know 10,000 words, but can barely utter a sentence. There are others who know 1500 words and sound fluent (at least to someone new to teaching).

 

Memorizing words is very different from being able to use them correctly and effectively.

 

There was one person who you may have heard of that is especially well known for thinking and creating with images.

 

And that’s my story for today…

 

Have you ever heard of this guy? 

 

 

He was a very quiet kid.

 

He hardly spoke at all until he was three years old. His parents thought that something was wrong with him and they consulted a doctor.

 

He was even told that he would never amount to much.

 

When he was about 5 years old, his parents gave him a magnetic compass.

 

And that is where it all began.

 

He was fascinated by the fact that no matter which way he turned the compass, the needle always pointed in the same direction. This new “toy” made him curious. It made him wonder about magnetic fields, which led him to become interested in physics.

 

That’s how his lifetime journey of exploration started. Many years later, he wrote about the compass saying: “That experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. ”

 

His name: Albert Einstein.

 

Most of us are not that level genius. But we do have the same capacity to be curious about new things. We love novelty.

 

Albert Einstein once said what?

 

He once said that all of his most important and productive thinking was done by playing with images in his imagination, “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

 

His work on gravity was influenced by imagining riding a free-falling elevator.

 

Everyone is born with an imagination. Storytelling is engrained in us. We are all storytellers to some degree. 

 

We are nothing like Albert Einstein, but visual images do help connect our thoughts. They can help us retain things by sequencing ideas together and putting words in context.

 

New words are novel and we should explore and create with them.

 

The mind and imagination are wonderful things. Our job as teachers and leaders is to give our students opportunities to use words. 

 

Don’t just ask them to memorize a random list of words and expect them to pass the test you give them. Give your students opportunities to grow. Ask them to tell you a story about their weekend (I mean a real story with adjectives and suspense, etc.)

 

Here’s some food for thought:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rethinking-thought/201602/new-look-visual-thinking

 

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1936731_1936743_1936760,00.html

 

Keywords: overcoming shyness, how to overcome shyness in the ESL-EFL classroom

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Lessons and Resources to Teach, Lead and Inspire During a Global Pandemic

First of all, hello to all of our subscribers, teachers, and leaders.

We have been extremely quiet over the past year and for that we sincerely apologize.

However, we have been hard at work, creating hundreds of new lesson plans.

We have been modifying, updating, and editing older content and completely redesigning Pocket Passport’s user interface and experience.

More about all of that in some blogs over the coming weeks as we roll things out.

For now, we wanted to check in and hopefully offer fellow teachers and schools some lesson content and materials.

However, we thought that we should focus on positive things that are happening in the world right now.

We completely understand how easy it is to become completely absorbed, overwhelmed, and paralyzed by our current global situation.

Quite frankly, it sucks.

However, we also believe that as teachers, educators, and leaders, we need to step up like never before.

We aren’t here to dwell on what is bad with everything that is happening in the world (because that is evident enough).

More importantly, as teachers and leaders, we are here to help our students go forward positively.

We are here to teach: compassion, caring, trust, sharing, love, understanding, empathy, sympathy, how to overcome fear, cultural awareness, hope, wisdom, and optimism, to show that tomorrow will be better.

How we handle what lies ahead of us will make us better people, communities, and human beings.

This current situation is unprecedented in our lifetimes and it seems it is still very much, just the beginning.

Physical health is part one.

Economical, mental, spiritual health are all challenges which lie ahead.

As a result, we have created a series of lessons and resources to focus on things to spread all that is good today.

And what we can look forward to in the future.

I invite you all to join us to create a better world today – student-by student, and lesson-by-lesson.

So that tomorrow we are more prepared and better equipped to take on the most challenging  upcoming phase of our global pandemic: recovery.

The conversations, videos, illustrations, and lesson plans are all meant to stimulate conversations, share, and tell stories in order to make the best of this situation.

To make the world a better place.

Today’s first set of resources is a set of illustrations about sharing and caring.

We encourage you to teach vocabulary and expressions that are centered around positive, happy ideas that are helping to make the world a better place to be.

The world is in dire need of leadership right now. The world needs more leaders like you.

To access the original set and lots more resources that encourage, promote and teach optimism, growth and leadership sign up: www.pocketpassport.com