MariaVlachopoulou

It was the beginning of summer and my colleague, Chris, let me know about the call for participation for the training course "Like the story" by the organisation Active Youths of Florina. "I thought you might be interested", he messaged me. And indeed I was. A general description of the course included the following - "key phrases" for me: "empower the young people to be critical of their information intake and source", "explore the concept of storytelling and different techniques", "urban legend", "transformative theatre", "challenging stereotypes", "common values","social diversity", "migration", "refugees","social media". I really couldn't be more interested in a course, since I have been dealing with all these issues through projects  at school for the past few years. I had some experience but experience can never be enough! So I applied. And I w...

This is a guest blog post for my friend's Theodora's (Papanagiotou) blog "Keep on teaching" at Christmas 2016.   https://theodorapap.blogspot.gr/2016/12/xmas-2016-lesson-ideas-with-maria.html?m=1

Tampering with the famous Shakespearean quote I feel that many of you may agree with me that trying to teach reading to students, in a world that students do not read anymore, may turn out to be a very challenging venture! Because the sad truth is that most students do not like reading, either because they don't know what to read, or because they don't know how to read or even because they read for the wrong purpose! So, it is widely accepted that students do not generally read long texts. They read in the social media. Bits and pieces- short posts, messages, comments, twits. They read, yes, but do they do any serious reading, even in L1? And how can we, teachers of English, expect them to not only cope with long reading texts in a foreign language  but also do tasks on these texts, under these circumstances? It must sound crazy to them! "It is often difficult to convince students of English as a foreign language that texts in English can be understood even though the...

I started the lesson with the video of the song "Happy" by Pharell Williams (feat.Minions)! The video is colourful with lyrics so pupils could sing along and get into the mood of the day easily! As a listening activity I asked them to count how many times the word "Happy" is heard. This was actually fascinating as the word is actually mentioned about 50 times in the song. After the counting had finished, I asked them how they felt listening and singing along-because they had been singing along! They said they felt happy! This is when I wrote on the board: Happy International Day of Happiness evrybody! And the fun began! This is where you can find the video:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOWDb2TBYDg We went on with colouring the happiness colouring sheet . Students had to pick up their favourite colours and notice how they felt as they coloured in their happy word. Other students chose another worksheet in which they had to design their own T-shirt of h...

We have used Voki with my 6th graders for our etwinning project last year, too!So you could say we had already been familiar with it and maybe-just maybe-we wouldn't find it as exciting anymore!  But, no,  this year, we have found a new way to use it, a way that made it the most exciting, entertaining and successful activity of the project. Students had a great time and Voki is still on the top of the list with their favourite web tools! Those of you who have used Voki would know that students love making up characters and they could spend hours choosing the right eyes, nose or mouth, the appropriate background for their characters and they could go on forever experimenting with voices and  accents when they give their characters a voice to speak! This happens everytime! They are never bored because they have a large number of alternatives! The title of the activity was "Famous people in disguise" . Specifically, what they had to do was the following: Students w...

I have been working as an EFL teacher in the public sector for about ten years. I never really taught exactly what I had to teach-that is, the books set by the Ministry-I always liked to supplement them with materials of my own. And still that was not enough. There was constantly this feeling of inadequacy in me. I thought that to have the privilege to be around children every day and just teach them the language was not enough. I had to change something.  I gave it a lot of thought till I decided that I wanted to teach my students the same things I teach my children. I didn't want to give them solely knowledge. I wanted to teach them values, I wanted to raise their environmental awareness, I wanted to teach them about Human Rights, about Citizenship and Digital Citizenship, about bullying and racism and stereotypes. And many more... So a couple of years ago, I started having these "special days". A day raising awareness against bullying, a day raising awareness ag...

This is the presentation of our project for Teachers for Europe 2016: HUMAN-RIGHTS-REFUGEE RIGHTS-SOLIDARITY.