Hi all,

I am currently teaching at a middle school and I am really struggling to come up with lesson ideas. I have been teaching for 3 weeks (i am currently in my forth) and I have gone through 3 lessons plans with my grade 3 to varying success. Now I had originally planned to stick as close to the text book as I can but have found that to make the lessons incredibly boring however having asked my co-teacher about the text book she replied not to worry about sticking to close to the book and just try to get the kids to speak certain phrases. Now this is my problem I can't seem to find a happy medium between the text book and being given a vast range of things to plan lessons on and no idea what to get my kids talking about.

So if any of you are using these texts book I was wondering what sort of subject you were talking about and for how many weeks you stay on a chapter (I have my 3rd grade classes once every week so I need a new lesson every week).

Any help would be much appreciated!  :)

I find the Jin H. Choi books to be pretty awful. Some lessons can be decent, but other sections leave me wondering what grammar points/lexis they are trying to teach.

I usually stay on a chapter for 3 weeks. The first and second week concentrate on the 2 Listening/Talking sections with the last week being for review. For a class, I open up with a riddle, or some kind of word game, then I usually do the first and second listening parts, bust out a .ppt to reiterate some key phrases, and finally do some sort of game.  My main coteacher wanted me to do the listening and talking, so I'm stuck with that format for now.