Exploring and using the English Banana Website

I recently came across a really wonderful website called http://englishbanana.com/ and I thought I would share it with everyone else. The first most notable feature of this website is that everything is in the public domain, which means you are free to do absolutely anything with it. If you want, you can even re-cover the worksheets and sell them off as your own.

This is a wonderful website as it has all the English teaching resources anyone is likely to need. It has three different sections –

Entry Level for the simple stuff.

Intermediate Level for the more advanced students.

Advanced ESL level for the rocket scientists in your class.

Ironically it is easier to find all the teaching resources you will need by typing in “Public Domain Books” into the site’s search book than using the front page. He has 18 different books hidden on his site. They are all really well written and completely free to use.

To make life easier for you, I have also uploaded them all to my Google drive account, so you are free to directly download them to from there to! These books and resources did take a lot of finding and so you are welcome to download them and share them freely with anyone and everyone you like. There is more than enough material to provide holiday homework to students (with the bonus being most books have comprehensive answer worksheets to help them check their answers with their parents!)

You can also take each of these books and remodel them and improve them and make them more applicable to your own students. I found using the website http://www.pixabay.com very effective in this area, as then I could simply choose interesting pictures to go with each of the resources I was using. This is a great way of making the resources more interesting. In addition, as you change the pictures over the year, the students don’t think you are giving them the same set of worksheets more than once. It is even possible you could take a book and add winter pictures, then spring pictures and then summer pictures and hence create interesting “themed” English worksheet books.

In addition to the 4000 free worksheets and 25 or so different books, the website also has a games section. This is to be used with caution as surprisingly a lot of the games are not English language related, unless you were to include the reading.

Another great use this is website is to simply inspire you to think of how you can improve your own teaching ideas. The set of book on how to teach English without a formal course book was especially interesting. It starts with the concept book, followed by a book the man wrote a year later on how he achieved teaching without textbooks and finally he published a book containing the different lesson plans he used.

I really hope you find these resources as useful and inspiring as I did.