My New Blog and Teachers Pay Teachers Store

Today, I’m launching this blog and very soon I’ll be opening my new teaching materials store on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Hi everyone! I’m Andy. Welcome to my brand new blog 🙂

About 6 years ago, I jumped on a plane and started an amazing adventure living in Chiang Mai, in Thailand. While I was out there, I taught English as a Foreign Language at various schools and universities, and it was awesome! A couple of months ago, I returned to the UK and I’m taking a little break from teaching right now. Aside from hanging out with my incredibly-fun nieces, learning to drum, putting off training for a 10K, and brushing up on my own language skills, I’ll be creating some great teaching supplies and selling them in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, which will open very soon.

Aside from using this blog to showcase some awesome classroom supplies, I’ll be reflecting on my time as an EFL/ ESL teacher, sharing some of my favorite teaching ideas and my experiences studying for a PGCE-i (an English teaching qualification). I’ll also be writing about being a seller on Teacher Pay Teachers and the process of designing teaching materials. You can expect lots of nerding out about the joys of Excel, Adobe InDesign, VBA macros, and PowerPoint 🙂

That’s all to come later, though. For now, I’ll just give you a taster of my launch products. My store will be opening in about a week and I’m launching with 5 new paid-for products and one freebie, all aimed at CEFR-equivalent A2-B1 EAL/ESL students. If you’re as baffled by CEFR as most teachers, that means (very roughly) U.S. Grades 2 to 5 or U.K. Key Stage 2.My favorite product is this multi-lesson Pop Star Interview Activity Pack. It includes a four-page worksheet, role cards, a step-by-step lesson guide, and supporting PowerPoints. It’s a refresher for/ introduction to subject-verb agreement and tense consistency and features an extended role-playing activity which takes advantage of the ideas of structured interdependence and peer support. These lessons have always been really successful whenever I’ve taught them.

Next, there are these awesome Conversation Cards, which are great for milling exercises and developing speaking confidence. The pack includes 200 conversation prompt cards and 6 suggested activities.

I’ve also made this colorful Present Simple Tense Worksheet, which includes a step-by-step guide to forming present simple sentences and lots of practice activities.

Using a similar style and color scheme, these two sets of classroom grammar posters help students learn how to form negative sentences and how to ask questions in multiple tenses.

As I mentioned above, I’m also giving away a free sample of my launch products, featuring a grammar poster, a selection of the conversation cards, and a PowerPoint of some fun ESL warmers.

Ok, that’s it for now. Look out for further posts in the run-up to launch day!