Get 3 easy-to-use leveled emergency sub plans when you subscribe to The ESL Nexus Newsletter!
If you don’t know who Greta Thunberg is, chances are your more environmentally-aware students do. She’s the Swedish teenager who started the worldwide movement of students striking on Fridays to address the impact of climate change. You can read more about her HERE. Below are 8 websites that will help
(This post was updated April 8, 2026) I’ve been thinking, during Women’s History Month this year, about two girls who were my students at different times of my public school teaching career. Both were survivors of sexual violence. The first girl was 12 years old and her mother’s boyfriend had
For those of you who have participated in the monthly #ELLEdTech Twitter chats, I would like to inform you that Laurah and I are taking some time off from co-hosting them. FYI: No more #ELLEdTech chats until further notice; source: The ESL Nexus We both were too busy to do
Have you ever run out of time when teaching a class? Have you ever wished you had more time in the day to get all your lesson planning and photocopying done? Does time seem to pass you by because you’re stuck inside grading papers? Well, don’t despair! TeachersPayTeachers is about
Me learning to use an Instant Pot is like my students learning to use English. I bought an Instant Pot during the cyber sale over Thanksgiving weekend last year and as I went through the process ofmfiguring out how to use it, I was reminded of the stages of language
What is the message that is given to students when a Social Studies course on World Geography has textbooks for Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and North America but not for Africa or Latin America? That was the situation I found myself in when I had to teach that subject
I know I’m not alone in saying I hated taking standardized tests. The pressure of having to finish within a proscribed time period combined with not knowing precisely what would be on the test generated a high level of anxiety. And to top it off, it often took weeks before
(This post has been updated to show the dates of the holidays in 2025.) January 1st is New Year’s Day throughout the world that uses the Christian Gregorian calendar. But many religions and cultures celebrate the New Year on other days. Below is a chart showing New Year celebrations for
When I was a student, my school district in Pennsylvania had a wonderful science curriculum. The entire textbook consisted of descriptions of scientific concepts and how to demonstrate or prove them by doing experiments. For every experiment we had to write a hypothesis, write the steps for doing the experiment,
Not all students, however, love math like Rosalyn Yalow, a 1977 Nobel Prize winner, did. English Language Learners in particular often have difficulty in their math classes. Their lower levels of language proficiency can make it hard for them to be successful when have to solve word problems and then
Have you ever wondered what English Language Learners think about being in ESL programs? I thought it would be interesting and illuminating to find out so I invited a few of my former students to describe their experiences. Here is the third and last interview. You can read the first
