TESOL Greece

It's the first Sunday of August and we are feeling very summer-y!

From everyone on the TESOL Greece team, we are wishing you a wonderful summer vacation to recharge and re-gear!

✨ Something new is starting tomorrow… ✨

Every Friday, this page is getting a little more us. Say hello to TESOuL Fridays — our new weekly space for the TESOL Greece community to connect, share, and celebrate what makes ELT in Greece feel like home. 💛

❣️ We'd love to have YOU featured in it!
Each week, TESOUL Fridays shines the spotlight on one of you — your story, your classroom, your journey in ELT.

All we need:
📸 A photo or short video of yourself
✍️ A few lines about you — your name, where/what you teach, and anything you'd love the community to know
If that sounds like you, send this page a message with your photo/video + short bio, and we'll take care of the rest. 💛

👀 First one drops tomorrow… and it's someone who's been showing up for this community from the very front. Guess who in the comments — first to get it right gets a shoutout! 🎉

📚 Reflect & Share

Last week, we reflected on the advice we'd give our first-year teacher selves. This week, let's celebrate how far we've come.

✨ What is one personal or professional goal you've achieved in the past year that you're proud of?

Whether it's trying a new teaching approach, completing a course, improving your wellbeing, or reaching a personal milestone, every achievement deserves to be celebrated.

Share your success in the comments, tag a friend, and let's inspire one another by recognising the progress we've made—big or small. 💙

Monday Teaching Tip brought to you by the TESOL Greece Journal No. 3!

July is well upon us and the school year well behind us (or nearing its close for some of our colleagues who are headstarting the next one with summer lessons) so we thought we'd share a low-effort and customizable idea for September.

Desk Pets, as Evangelia (Valia) Nikolaidou calls them in her article for our 168th Issue, act as a classroom management and gamification tool. It engages students on many levels; creatively, by honing their fine motor skills and as a motivational tool. It can work as a reward system, similar to the ever popular sticker system, or as a motivating way to revise language (e.g. by asking simple questions like "what is your desk pet doing?" we are giving students a chance to use relevant language and structures that we have taught them in previous lessons like the present continuous or the action verbs).

You can read more about Valia's insight and experience with using Desk Pets and get inspired to add your own twist by reading this article from our 168th Issue (October-December 2025).

What do you think? Have you ever used Desk Pets in your classroom? Would you be interested to implement them next time you step into class? We would love to hear your thoughts below.

Monday Teaching Tip #2 | Drama in the ELT Classroom

Bring language to life through drama.
🌱Invite students to step into a role,
🌱use a simple prompt, and
🌱respond as a character.

Even a two-minute role-play can lower inhibition, build fluency, and turn vocabulary into lived communication.

Find more engaging ideas in the TESOL Greece Journal, on using drama in language teaching by our members Mary Dimoliapis and Julie Yiouli Labropoulou.

The current issue of the Journal is freely available on our website, and members can also explore previous journal issues.

Read it here:
https://tesolgreece.org/news/tesol-greece-journal-170

🤗Your turn: What is one drama activity your students always enjoy? Share!

Our Summer Event in Kalamata was a delight!

Thanks to our enthusiastic members and their cameras we have a few highlights to share.

Much gratitude to Constantina Constantopoulou for her presentation, to Zafi Mandali for her photographic contributions and, of course, to all of you who joined us on this trip!

Till the next one!

📚 Reflect & Share

If you could go back and give one piece of advice to your first-year teacher self, what would it be?

Teaching is a journey filled with lessons, challenges, and moments of growth. Looking back, what is something you wish you had known when you first stepped into the classroom?

Share your advice in the comments and inspire fellow educators in our TESOL Greece community. 💙

Here's a TESOL Teaching Tip brought to you by our latest issue of the TESOL Greece Journal!

STEAM is a much talked about in ELT lately. At first, it may sound odd that we would use STEAM in our ELT classroom, but, when the principles of it are examined closely, we see that it is the perfect opportunity for us to diversify the classroom, make it more inclusive and sustainable. It is all about students experimenting and problem-solving.

So, our tip when it comes to STEAM is: keep the focus on the student! Let them try it their own way; form their own questions and reach their own conclusions. Along the way they will learn many things and more importantly for us both the target language and the language of the language of problem-solving and critical thinking. And all of that in their own unique way!

If you are interested to dive deeper, Evdoxia Frantzeskaki and Konstantina Alevizou have written a wonderful article on the topic for our 170th Journal that has become available to all our members. Here's a small preview.

Visit our website https://tesolgreece.org/ for more information on the journal.