STUFF WORTH CARRYING AROUND WITH YOU
I never cease to be amazed at the garbage I see some teachers carrying around with them from country to country. Especially those fresh out of training courses. Copies of books full of activities and games, flash cards, laminated pairwork activites, plastic fruit. . . my god, what a waste of space.
You don't generally need to drag books full of photocopiable activities around with you, because if your school has a photocopier, it'll probably have some books full of photocopiable activities anyway. And if it doesn't, well, you're fucked.
Here's all you need.
1) a ball -- I know, I said I'd write a whole article on the glory of the ball sometime. Well, this isn't it, but DAMN is a ball useful. In and of itself it's nothing especially conductive to learning, but it can turn the most boring and repetitive of drills into something even the stupid 12 year old sporty kids in the back enjoy. Students can throw it around and do letters of the alphabet, spell out words, say different words of vocabulary groups, ask questions to other students, say one word and try to spell out a sentence, etc. It can be used for competition or just to add a physical element to otherwise boring recitations. Plus you can use it to throw to students whose names you don't remember.
2) some dice -- I've already told you numerous dice games, and I'm sure I'll write a whole article about how useful dice are sometime, too. Carry enough with you to give one to each pair. Ten should generally do it. Students can roll dice to get randomly numbered question words to practice --
1)what 2)where 3)when 4)why 5)who 6)how.
They can roll to get randomly numbered tenses --
1)past simple 2)past continuous 3)present simple 4)present continuous 5)present perfect 6)future.
They can get randomly chose topics -- 1) sports 2) films 3) TV 4)travel 5)politics 6)nightclubs
and then they have to ask as many questions as their fevered little minds can create.
And if you need larger numbers -- well, just roll the dice twice to get numbers between 2 and 12, or 3 and 18, or 4 and 24.
Christ, never thought playing DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS would help me later in life, but damned if it hasn't.
3) magazine pictures -- yeah, you heard me. Magazine pictures. It won't take long to collect a few dozen and if you put them in a magazine file they won't take up too much space. I recommend pictures from news magazines, especially where something is happening that is not immediately identifiable. Some good clear pictures of people of varying descriptions can be useful to, but lay off on people who are too famous.
Students can talk about what is happening in the pictures to practice the present continuous tenses. They can describe what the people are wearing and what they look like. They can use modal verbs of probability to describe what might be happening, where the people might be, what might have happened, etc. They can make predictions using "will" and "going to" about what they think might happen next.
Rock and roll baby. So leave the plastic banana at home. Unless you can think of a better use for it.