MGM Online Teacher's code

Since a lot of you have been asking for this year's teachers code for Mary Glasgow Plus website to take a sneak peek before deciding on a subcription. This year's teachers' code is ejbzw8. You're welcome!

School's out!

Photo taken in Madeira, Portugal, 2017

My first graders and our final show

Every year, after we finish with our classes, I do a final show with my first graders and we invite their whole families. It's not something a teacher is obligated to do, but I feel it's a nice way of summing the whole year up. The students introduce themselves in English, do a couple of skits and sing a few song, nothing complicated, but the parents love it. Here are some pictures from this year's show: CLICK

My classroom in a newspaper!

Yay! I'm famous! They wrote a story about me and published it in a newspaper!

Well, not exactly. They did publish a piece about young learners of English is Slovenian schools in Nedelo (both in a newspaper and online) and I was one of the teachers giving their views on the matter. They also took some shots in my classroom and even borrowed some photos from my blog ... So, yeah, I was kinda famous for five minutes there, just as Mr Warhol had predicted. :)

I let my seventh graders correct my third graders' notebooks and here's what happened ...

So here I am, just your average exhausted teacher with endless piles of third grader notebooks to correct in front of her. My seventh graders all around, enjoying their snack break, oblivious to my sighs of resignation. Not that they are paying no attention to me - oh no! - they have their own requests for the teacher! I try to suppress any snarky comments but fail miserably: "Oh and in the meantime, I suppose you will be correcting all these notebooks?" 

And THEY, instead of rolling their eyes at me as any sane teacher would expect from any sane student, shout:

"YEEES!"
"Oh can we? For REAL?"
"Can I have my brother's notebook, please?"
"Oh Miss, can I have TWO?"

And they were not messing with me, oh no. Despite my initial scepticism, I  gave out every relatively good student's notebook to one of my seventh graders that day (I decided to keep the challenging ones for myself) and boy, did they take it seriously. They brought the notebooks back the next day and here are some of their comments:

"That was HARD. After a few pages of the same mistakes over and over again, even I wasn't sure anymore how to spell apple."

"That boy (the owner of the notebook) is amazing. There were practically no mistakes. I think I actually would have made more."

"How do you manage to understand that handwriting?"

"I decided to be a teacher one day!" (awwwwwww)

"I decided NEVER to become a teacher."

"Miss, can I have another one?"

and the inevitable: "Does this bring extra credit?" 


Of course, I had to correct all of those notebooks all over again. However, I do think that was a valuable experience for my seventh graders and I think I'll probably do it again in the future - this time on purpose.

Five Little Green Frogs

Five Little Green Frogs is a story from Hello Robby Rabbit YL course, loosely based on the Five Little Speckled Frogs nursery rhyme (story cards available for download HERE). The story and the song that goes with it are both among my YL's favourites. There's so much you can do with this topic and here are just some examples from my classroom:

Cup theatre

Our annual bean planting project

Every year I plant some beans with my first graders and I wrote about that extensively a few years ago, so I won't go into that any deeper. However, what was different this year was the result - our beans would make Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk jealous!

Upcoming workshops and seminars

I have to admit I haven't been very active in the area of of professional development this year. The school year just seems to go by faster each year. However, here are more chances:


Understanding IELTS: Techniques for English Language Tests (webinar)

Rokus Klett: Učitelj prihodnosti (Brdo pri Kranju, Mar 3)

EXPLORERS (Mar 2018)

Super Minds (Mar 2018)

MOOC-V: O kraji gesel, virusih in spletnem nasilju (Mar 2018)

Shrove Tuesday

Mmm ... It's Shrove Tuesday again. Time to put on our costumes (yet again! Yay, the perks of being a teacher), eat some more delicious food (not that I need a special reason for that) and have some more fun and engaging lessons in my classroom. 

Here are some Shrove Tuesday activities from my classroom (grades 1 - 9).

Paper doll dress up

Playway to English 1 activities - my students don't have their own textbooks, so I project the materials on my smartboard.

Peppa Pig: Fancy Dress Party (Youtube video)

Mary Glasgow Plus: Pancake Day and Valentine's Day (Culture Crew video & activities)

British Council Teens: Pancake Day (reading comprehension & interactive exercises)

Aaaand a very hungry teacher with a doughnut at the end of the school day. I ate five. Yes, five. No wonder Shrove Tuesday is also called Fat Tuesday.

The many faces of a teacher

Teaching is certainly no monotonous job and it doesn't have to be Halloween or Mardi Grass for a teacher to look different than his normal self. Can't tell you how many times I've roamed the school halls wearing silly clothes and paint on my face - and I've managed to venture outside the school walls looking like this on more than one occasion as well! But if you're a true teacher, you learn to make do with curious glances, don't you?

Here are just some of the costumes I've had to put on recently - OK, the last photo isn't technically a costume, but it actually took more guts than roaming the streets of Ljubljana dressed as a witch. :)

Visiting the mines of Mežica, Oct 2018

The Roman Emona field trip, Nov 2018

The Ljubljana ZOO, Nov 2018

My class and our little Christmas party