One of the core principles of the Positivity Planner, and a wellbeing tool that is backed up by huge amounts of research, is the concept of gratitude. Simply taking the time to think about what you are grateful for, either once a day, or even just once a week, can have a huge impact on your mental, and therefore also physical, wellbeing.
I don’t know about you, but often at the end of a long week, when I’m exhausted and counting down the minutes until the weekend, I find it can be all too easy to focus on the negatives. Therefore, every Friday, I make an effort to reflect on the brilliant things that have happened during the week, and fill in the relevant box in my Positivity Planner.
I recently listened to the brilliant (if somewhat controversial!) Johann Hari on the Feel Better Live More podcast with Dr Rangan Chatterjee and found one of his ideas particularly interesting… the notion of ‘junk values’.
Hari described this concept in an article in the LA Times: “Junk food looks like food, but it doesn’t meet our underlying nutritional needs. In a similar way, junk values don’t meet our underlying psychological needs — to have meaning and connection in our lives. Extrinsic values are KFC for the soul. Yet our culture constantly pushes us to live extrinsically.”
Continue reading “Positivity Toolkit – Junk Values worksheet”
I am so excited to be able to give you a sneak peek of my French and German GCSE Listening resources!
These have been a long time in the making and I have to say a massive thank you to the very kind native speakers whose voices you hear on these recordings! I was overwhelmed with offers of help from people and you can now purchase the full French booklet on the theme of ‘Identity and Culture’.
For now, here are three questions on the topic of ‘Me, my family and friends’ – one foundation, one foundation/higher and one higher. Enjoy!
The French sound files are available in this Dropbox folder, and the German ones are here.
The full French resource is available here!
As always, please email me kate@katelanguages.co.uk or get in touch on Facebook or Twitter to give me feedback and let me know how you’re using these resources!
As I pride myself on having top-quality resources, and it was pointed out to me that there were a few mistakes on the Spanish Christmas freebie, I have now added a corrected version to the files available for download here.
However, if you’ve already ordered the files, you won’t automatically have access to the new corrected version. So, if you have already gone through the process of putting your details into PayPal, etc and downloaded the files and don’t feel like doing it all over again but would really like a (hopefully this time) perfect version, fear not! Here is the corrected file, available for quick and easy download:
I filmed this earlier on a little walk when I was trying to wake myself up and get some motivation. Just to prove I’m not some ridiculously sunny, annoyingly positive person all the time! I have to work on it every day, just like most people, especially when it’s cold and dark outside all the time!
Continue reading “Prioritising workload – even when you’re lacking motivation!”
On the Facebook group ‘Global Innovative Language Teachers’, someone recently posted a link to this brilliant set of ‘extra’ Guess Who characters. In fact, it’s so brilliant that I’m using it with the primary school-aged children I teach this week and I thought I’d write a quick blog post about how I’m using the game to practise sports vocab and physical descriptions.
While preparing a lesson for a GCSE French student this morning, I came across this excellent set of reading strategies on an Edexcel document. It’s too good not to share!
The Teacher Positivity Planner is a brand new way of organising your working day and focusing on your wellbeing at the same time.
The weekly overview includes sections to record gratitude, priorities, weekly self-care and brilliant things that have happened that week. The day pages have a priorities section, morning and evening boxes and a daily reflection box.
I have created 3 new courses on memrise to accompany my Key Stage 3 vocabulary and grammar booklets. They currently include the topics of ‘me, my family and friends’, ‘technology and free time’, and ‘where I live’. I’ll keep adding to them as I write and publish more Key Stage 3 booklets.
The French course is available here, the German one is here and the Spanish one is here.
I have also put a number of GCSE and A Level (French) courses on memrise – just look through my profile to find the best ones for your language and level!
Click here for free samples of the vocabulary and grammar books:
Happy vocab learning!
