Teaching Resources
Many people who come to teach in Korea have not actually taught before. Because Korea does not require any teaching certificate or experience, there are often times teachers are put into a sink-or-swim situation.
We at Say Kimchi Recruiting do our best to hire only the most qualified teachers. If you don’t have teaching experience, than we believe your personality or life experience will help you swim through the sometimes choppy waters of the classroom.
Students in Korea are usually more disciplined—and in some cases better behaved—than their western counterparts. But kids are kids, and it’s important that you know how to engage them.
Here are some resources to help you prepare some lesson plans, games and activities to make your classroom livelier. I also wrote a blog in my first few months in Korea about what I had learned about teaching at that point. Read it here.
- MES English, a web site offering thousands of free ESL flashcards, worksheets, BINGO cards, and game boards. It’s a must-use for any teacher who needs some extra teaching materials. I’ve taught entire semesters with this one web site. The materials are endless.
- Dave’s ESL Café Idea Cookbook, a site offering more than 2,000 ideas for games and activities in the ESL classroom. This is a great place to find 5- or 10-minute games that can really liven up your lesson.
- Lantern Fish, a site offering flashcards, worksheets, lesson plans and more for the ESL teacher. This is a great site to use in addition to MES English.
- Time for Kids, a Time, Inc. product that offers news around the world, lesson plans and worksheets. This is a wonderful site for your more advanced students in elementary and middle school.
- Breaking News English, a site offering thousands of 13-page handouts on current events with lesson plans, podcasts, quizzes, listening exercises and more. A perfect site for your more advanced students.
- Enchanted Learning, a site offering worksheets, games and activities to stimulate creativity, learning, enjoyment, and imagination. There is a membership fee of $20 per year but is totally worth it, especially if you want to blend science and other subjects into your lessons.
- Start a blog! Another thing that we did while we were in Korea was start a blog for our students that connected them with students in America and Canada. It was a great way to do pen pals and for our students to make videos where they were speaking English to their new friends in North America. A fantastic blog site that makes it easy is edublogs.org.
Check out our student blog here.