Learning English through word puzzles
It’s always quite magical to open the box and find a stack of the latest ESL Extras book: they’re real, they’re here – and looking back through my files, it’s only taken around three years… This time it’s a puzzle book – Extra Easy Puzzles – for what I call ‘Beginner C’ learners: strong beginners who can read sentences comfortably and know about … Continue reading
When ESOL reading becomes fun…
Carly and Kumar to the rescue… Yesterday I had to find an activity for a young woman waiting for her husband to finish English language class… what could I offer her to make that couple of hours less tedious? I showed her a few ESOL reading books, and she grabbed Karen Barber’s ‘Carly and Kumar’, with a smile, though she … Continue reading
SpellingWorks – now online
Interested in spelling? It’s a while since Maureen Hague and I wrote a book called Spellingworks for Heinemann Australia – so long that it’s gone out of print. Hooray for the publisher (now Pearson), however – and for the artist, Shane Nagle – and for the publishers who have tiny extracts of their books somewhere on a page – they … Continue reading
Passionate about Picture Crosswords…
My next ESL Extras book is almost ready to go – a puzzle book called Extra Easy Puzzles. I’m not the only puzzle creator around, of course, and I’ve recently seen beginner learners getting very excited about some picture puzzles given to them by their class teacher. When I looked more closely, I realised that these puzzles came from the Picture … Continue reading
Let’s Connect: An Australian Grammar Workbook
Talking to Helga Burry, ESOL grammar book author and grammar enthusiast: I always get excited about new Australian ESOL/EAL resources, and once again, I know the author. I met Helga, who has just published Let’s Connect: An Australian Grammar Workbook, when we taught together in a refugee camp in Thailand, years ago. (The same camp where I met Carmel Davies, from Urban Lyrebirds … Continue reading
