“Deanna Jump is a 43-year-old kindergarten teacher who earns less than $30,000 a year. But this year, she says she has made $1 million. Yes, really.

How? TeachersPayTeachers.com (TPT), the online marketplace that allows teachers to sell lesson plans to other teachers. Jump became the first teacher on the site to earn more than $1 million on the site by using selling her lesson plans focused on teaching kindergarteners.

“Teaching is a hobby for me now,” Jump says. “I’ve made way more on TeacherPayTeachers, obviously. I don’t need to teach anymore, but teaching is my passion. I cannot imagine not teaching.”

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5 Creative Uses Of PowerPoint Presentations You Haven’t Explored Yet

See on Scoop.it - Learning Teaching

Death by PowerPoint is a popular term. It’s unfair that PowerPoint gets the stick as there are more than a few presentation tools around. As anyone who has taken the pains to make a memorable PowerPoint presentation will tell you – the secret of the steak is in the sizzle. The sizzle also comes and stops at creativity. If you have creativity by your side, you can use PowerPoint as your canvas.

See on www.makeuseof.com

Free Lesson Plans & Resources (No Prep!)

In this post I would like to share what I think are some of the most useful English teaching websites on the internet.  All these sites are free and the resources you will find there are pretty much ready to use straight away.

I have chosen these sites because I think they will enable you to deliver really great TEFL lessons, and hopefully inspire some new ideas for ways to take advantage of the huge amount of work that has gone into creating these ESL teaching resources.

I love creating engaging teaching materials and you can purchase some of them for just a couple of dollars in the shop.

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Teaching Vocabulary

Its easy to get stuck using the same tired old methods of teaching vocabulary, so its worth reading up a little on different approaches and activities to raise your awareness of some other options you could adapt to your lessons.

Vocabulary is vital to successful communication and will also allow your students to access a wider range of materials and stimulus (authentic readers, videos, newspapers, magazines) which will increase the pleasure of learning, and using, a language.

It could be argued that using the correct words in a sentence without any grammatical structure at all could still lead to a successful interaction. 

For example compare,  'airconditioning, leak' to 'house, problem'.  I know I have survived many challenging situations in foreign countries using this method!

Students at school should be aiming to acquire at least 400 new words a year.  Doing so with the ability to not only recognise these words, but produce them correctly in written and spoken exchanges will require the teacher resorting to a variety of methods and sufficient repetition beyond the odd game of hangman!

Here are a few useful links for teaching vocabulary.

http://www.increasevocabulary.net/make-words-relevant.html

http://buildvocabulary.org/index.php

http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/vocab/strategies.html

Do you have any good ideas or useful resources for teaching vocabulary?