The Break Room

The course

Curriculum

Seventy-four lessons across ten modules, three a week. Everything already published stays free and stays here; scheduled lessons show their date.

Module 1

Where does this student start?

  1. 1Placement is the first thing you teach
  2. 2What a student can do versus what they cannot
  3. 3Reading the gap between two levels
  4. 4The age track matters more than the score
  5. 5Kids, teens and adults are not the same beginner
  6. 6Finding the entry lesson, not the entry level
  7. 7Holiday lessons are not placement points
  8. 8When you place wrong and have to move them

Module 2

The first five minutes

  1. 1You are an anxiety manager who teaches grammar
  2. 2The Affective Filter, and what raises it
  3. 3Warm-ups are not small talk
  4. 4The first five minutes decide the lesson
  5. 5Making mistakes on purpose, and laughing at them
  6. 6The 5-Second Rule
  7. 7Student talking time is the whole game
  8. 8What to do when the tech fails and you have 45 minutes

Module 3

The student who will not speak

  1. 1The five silent students, and why the label matters
  2. 2The Parrot: when repeating hides not understanding
  3. 3The Perfectionist and the Sacrificial Lamb
  4. 4The Silent Statue is processing, not refusing

Module 4

Sounds before spelling

  1. 1Sounds come before letters, always
  2. 2The six syllable types, and the seventh
  3. 3Closed syllables and why cat is the starting point
  4. 4Open syllables, and the long vowel that needs no help
  5. 5Magic E is a job, not a decoration
  6. 6Vowel teams travel in pairs
  7. 7The bossy R and the vowel it swallows
  8. 8Consonant-le, and the syllable nobody teaches
  9. 9Where to split a word, and the two rules that decide
  10. 10The schwa: English's laziest and most common sound
  11. 11Syllables are the heartbeat of English
  12. 12The Robot and Chin test
  13. 13Word stress with a rubber band
  14. 14Blending before decoding, decoding before reading

Module 5

When reading breaks down

  1. 1Decoding problem or vocabulary problem?
  2. 2Reading in a first language shapes reading in English
  3. 3What Mandarin readers bring, and what trips them
  4. 4What Spanish and Italian readers bring
  5. 5The long word that stops everything
  6. 6Spot and Dot, step by step
  7. 7Chunking a word your student has never seen
  8. 8When they can read it aloud but not tell you what it meant
  9. 9Timed drills, and when they stop helping
  10. 10Reading in connected text, not in lists
  11. 11Games that make decoding worth doing

Module 6

Nouns are harder than they look

  1. 1Countable and uncountable: units and puddles
  2. 2A, An, The: the Spotlight method
  3. 3Collective nouns and the Team Box
  4. 4The Lasso apostrophe, and the S that means two things

Module 7

Adjectives in order

  1. 1Why nobody can explain adjective order, including natives
  2. 2The OSASCOMP assembly line
  3. 3Adjective intensity, and the Battery Meter
  4. 4Bored or boring: the feeling and the cause

Module 8

Tenses without the table

  1. 1The Golden Sentence Method
  2. 2Morphing one sentence through every tense
  3. 3Time Machine, Instagram Stories, or a whiteboard timeline
  4. 4The tenses that break students, and why
  5. 5Irregular verbs and the Broken Rule puppet

Module 9

Getting them to actually talk

  1. 1Role-play is not conversation practice
  2. 2Simulations versus role-plays
  3. 3Scaffolding a role-play so it cannot fail
  4. 4Nine role-plays that work on a screen
  5. 5Visuals that carry meaning, not decoration

Module 10

Correcting without crushing

  1. 1The Hot Sheet: correcting without interrupting
  2. 2Immediate, delayed, or selective: choosing per student
  3. 3Recasting for kids, brackets for adults
  4. 4Writing feedback the parent will actually read
  5. 5Naming what they did, not how they made you feel
  6. 6Constructive without softening it into nothing
  7. 7Feedback by skill: speaking, listening, reading, writing
  8. 8Feedback that a translator will not mangle
  9. 9Ending a report so they come back
  10. 10Feedback at scale without it becoming a template

To close

Finale

  1. 1What to do with all of this