The Step4Challenge is a Treasure Hunt! Any English teacher can run this S4E Activity. 
There are only 4 simple steps to follow:

1) Choose a Place
I went to the Hungarian Agricultural Museum last weekend and took about 100 photos. You can use any place including your own classroom, a garden or the streets around your school will do.

2) Plan the Stations
Plan stations and number them. There were 10 stations at the Hungarian Museum. 
Give a list of 8 words, some questions and exercises connected to the attraction at each 
station. 
The first time you prepare this exercise it is time-consuming , but you’ll get faster and better at it quickly.
This game works for several different levels simultaneously. Make sets of words and questions for literacy to advanced level students. 

3) P&P (Printing and Packing)
Print 4 different documents:
         1) Sticky Labels envelope destinations
         2) To Do Notes envelopes for the students that include pictures, flash cards etc. Some notes needed to be printed only once for the group, sometimes you need as many copies as there are children. It depends on the activity.
       3) Next Station Clues go into the correct envelopes and direct students to the next station and activity
          4) Teacher’s Guide includes the overall plan. 


All these bits and pieces are packed in the right order to make an information chain. There are lessons at each station as well as clues to get to the next station. 

4) Treasure Hunt
It doesn’t take long to hide the envelopes but they must be in the right order. Students follow the notes in the envelopes. Give the “Introduction” envelope to the students before they go and find the first station. 

Students enjoy finding the envelopes and they also enjoy the exercises. 

At the museum the final envelope was held by an attendant who happened to be in a wheel chair. It took a few minutes for my students to find him. They asked several other attendants for help but nobody knew what they’d wanted. It was really funny and a great opportunity to practice speaking to strangers. 

The students enjoyed the program so much that after a short break we did another Treasure Hunt in the other part of the museum! 
Teachers often aren’t paid enough for this kind of work but for me the benefit to the students is worth it.

How's that for alliteration?  I've just published the first of a series of guidebooks on teaching American English pronunciation.  This one, American English for Arabic Speakers: A Guide to Pronunciation, compares Arabic and English vowel systems, word stress and intonation patterns, and shares techniques to help Arabic students master the American English sound.  It's available on Amazon.com as an e-book.

Keepers of the Flame is totally in tune with Albert Schweitzer's quote at the bottom of our Who we are page, "At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us".

This animated poem, created by Peter & Paul Reynolds and their teams at FableVision Studios, is a a lovely and heartwarming tribute to all teachers to celebrate "Teacher Appreciation Week" (May 5-9) in the United States.

Enjoy!

At Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers have been studying how spoken language is processed in the brain.  They conclude that the brain doesn't create rules that later organize spoken language; instead the brain continually looks for associations with already-known sounds, and links the new speech sound to those.  

Since our brains are intaking information at a phenomenal rate during ages 4-8 (more than at any other time in our lives), any sounds we hear or say later will be matched up with those pre-existing ones.  And since our first language doesn't have all possible sounds, we change L2 sounds (that don't have existing associations) into L1 sounds.

As Radical English teachers, we've known this for such a long time that it's strange to see it lauded as a "new discovery".  It seems we have to wait for "science" to "research" it and "prove" what radical teachers already know, that language learners learn best when we teach patterns, not rules! http://bit.ly/1nlaOGk