How to Spell "No One" and Other Fun Lessons from Drawings Of...

Lillie Marshall is an English teacher, writer, and artist whose work I've seen on social media for many years. So when she reached out to me last week to tell me about her new project called Drawings Of... I was more than happy to take a look at it.

Drawings Of... is a website full of Lillie Marshall's cartoons that were drawn for the purpose of teaching English lessons. Throughout the site you will find cartoons and written lessons about a variety of topics that are commonly taught in English classes. Take a look at this list of homophone cartoons or this list of figurative language examples to get a better sense of what Drawings Of... is all about. 

Lillie Marshall also has a YouTube channel that includes a playlist of Drawings Of... videos. In those videos you can see how she creates her cartoons. Many of the videos provide helpful English lessons on their own. It was in the Drawings Of... playlist that I found this helpful video about the spelling of "no one."

Applications for Education
Drawings Of... is exactly the kind of site that can help students get a better understanding of some tricky concepts in the English language. There's also a section the site that has a set of drawing and writing prompts that can could be helpful when a student says, "I don't know what to write about."

Film English - Film Activities for English Teachers

Last night Film English won the 2011 Edublog Award for Best Individual Blog. I had not heard of this blog before so I spent a bit of time exploring it this morning. Film English is blog written by Kieran Donaghy. Mr. Donaghy writes ideas and lesson plans for using film in the classroom.

According to Mr. Donaghy's about page there are three objectives for his blog:
1. Promote the critical and creative use of film in the language classroom.
2. Promote cineliteracy, the ability to read critically and evaluate moving images, in the language classroom.
3. Promote creativity amongst both teachers and students.

Two things stand out in the Film English blog posts. First, each blog post contains step-by-step directions for each lesson plan. Second, each blog post is tagged with a difficulty rating and age level rating to make it easy to find lessons appropriate for your students.

Applications for Education
If you're an English teacher or an ESL/ELL teacher interested in learning more about how to use film or video in your classroom, take a good look at the Film English blog. I think you'll be glad that you did.