There are times when you're class is going wrong or a colleague is ill and you've been asked to cover, you have no plan, no materials and a textbook that is boring your students to tears... These fillers require no preparation and no equipment beyond a whiteboard, markers and some paper. These are my favourites and have got me out of more than one hole...

I used to teach this a lot when I was an ESOL teacher and it never ceased to amaze me how creative my students could be, even the ones who barely had the vocabulary to describe their room at home came up with inspiring ideas. The idea is simple, show them the slides of future cities, get students to say what they see and then get them to write an essay as to what they think will happen to their city. I hope it brings as much joy to your lessons as it did to mine.

This Google Docs extension gives you the tools to really help EAL students and any student with a smaller vocabulary. The tools include: Low Frequency Word Highlighter - See which words are likely to be difficult Difficulty Guide (Pictured left) - This tool analyses the text in your doc and gives you a guide to reading time, difficulty and sentence complexity Low Frequency Table - This will add a table of low frequency words to your doc to enable you to add notes and for students to look them up in the dictionary. Create a Google Sheet of low frequency Words - This tool will enable you to add these words to your planning, pre-teach key vocabulary and give handouts. Grab the full resource at the RDPT Website.

Students often have difficulties doing plans for assignments. This lesson shows students 4 types of planning. Venn Diagrams, Lists, MindMaps and Free Text. Surprised that my year 12's really needed this and figured that it needs to be taught from KS2 onwards. (The PDF is provided for Mac users and is the same as the Publisher file)