Christmas and New Year are great fun, but once the party is over, the party poppers have all popped and the balloons have all deflated, it is our task, as teachers, to get the students back to work. We all know it is a hard slog to get back into work mode after a two week holiday and I have always found the Christmas holidays particularly arduous as the very nature of the break means we switch out of our usual routine.

As a child, I always ended up in tears on the night of December 25th, having been worn out by the excitement , the hype and the anticipation, the thought of it all being over for a whole year was just too much to bear. Of course, Christmas holidays are not like that for everyone. I did, obviously, grow out of it and I promise I did not cry this year at Christmas – well, not for that reason anyway !!

Back to school for teachers and back to school for pupils. The majority of kids will not have thought about school for two weeks and will have switched out of school mode completely. Our job is to get them back in school mode. Not an easy order !! Especially when we are struggling with it ourselves !!

I always advise my trainees to start off after Xmas as we started in September – brisk, business-like and as you mean to go on. I would advise giving homework from the get-go, as you did in September. This indicates firmly that the holidays are now OVER and it is time to get back into work mode. February half term will come round very quickly and after that, time flies by until the end of the year, particularly in lycées.

You can afford not to start a full-on sequence right on the first day back. Why not take some time to talk about what kids did over the holidays ? Of course, not all our pupils will have been celebrating Christmas, but they have all had two weeks off from school. What did they do ? This is an ideal opportunity to work on the simple past. My collège group, do you remember the Christmas with David Beckham that we worked on ? We worked on a powerpoint with Pat, Rod (or was it Bud) and Astrid. This would be ideal.

Diary Verbs – after the Christmas break could be an ideal time to introduce Diary Verbs. We discussed this in the collège group.

Lycée group – an activity that works after a holiday is Mystery Word – 5 words on the board and the students have to form Yes/No questions to ask you what the words correspond to. You can crank it up a notch by adding some lies into your package that the students have to identify. As a rule, they will be quite curious about your activities – do not feel you have to tell the whole truth. No one will check !! You can then get the students to prepare their own for an extension activity in pairs or groups.

Looking back over 2018 in pictures works a treat with lycée students and particularly the older classes. Great chance to revise V-ED too.  You will find a selection of photos by googling “retrospective 2018” – try this one Photos de l’année We offer the images, the pupils have to comment on them as much as they can. It can be done in groups or in pairs. The pupils could choose their own images for a different slant on the activity.

New Year’s Resolutions : the lycée group worked on this one. We identified a series of language points that could be useful :

I intend to V / I am planning to V / I am thinking of V-ING etc.

Don’t forget the idea of getting the pupils to make resolutions on a piece of paper and hiding them away until June. We have done that – you will be able to open the box in our last lessons before the end of the year.

Check out Audiolingua – see if there are audio files of interest. Here is a link to a B1 level file on New Year’s Resolutions :  Paul

Any other ideas to share ? Post up a message on the REMIND group. Enjoy the remainder of the holidays and see you soon.