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Dear Reader,

How was your inbox feeling without my newsletter for two (!) consecutive weeks? I for one hope that both you and your inbox were too busy stuffing your face with pandoro that you didn't even notice.

But now that I'm back, here's a platitude you hadn't already heard 5,407 times this month: happy new year!

I hope your holiday break was, if not wonderful, at least mildly restorative and that you are now, if not enthusiastically ready to start the new year, at least more ready than you were at the end of December.

As for me, I took a few days off work¹ and then came back to work subconsciously ready to... take another holiday to recover from my holidays. Unbeknownst to my poor subconscious, that holiday never existed, and so here I am, ready to tackle the new year with roughly the grace and energy of a cat who just woke up.

Thankfully, I work for you, which means that this first week back at work has actually been unexpectedly energising as I planned and started designing the new preparation course and classes for the new oral exam.

I am not only updating the course on lesson planning with a lot of the lessons we learned from last year's oral exams (e.g. discussing laws in English; prioritising so you can present in 15 minutes; citizenship education topics; ESP tracce), but also planning some live lessons and webinars on the things you've asked for. I don't want to spoil the surprise but they will include opportunities to practise answering the domande disciplinari, presenting your lesson plan, talking about laws in English², answering tricky follow-up questions from the committees... a lot is brewing and more info is coming soon!

For the time being, what do I have for you today? In the spirit of starting the year off on the right foot, today I have:

• 6 low-prep, fairly cool activities to start the year off on the right foot.

Ready to start 2026 with me? Let's get cooking (with gas)!³ ♨️

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Ideas to start the year off right

I can stipulate that returning to work or school (or, in your case, both) after a period of downtime can be appalling, particularly when it's 0 degrees, whether or not your car will start is an exciting new discovery every morning, and the winter bugs are out to get you (or if you're me, they've already got you).

However, demotivation can also be strong in our students right now, so for these first few days, my goal has been to kindly ease into things and to look ahead. A bit of hand-holding mixed with some gentle planning and goal-setting seems to have worked okay.

To that end, here are 6 low-prep activities you might like to try out. The first 3 are about the past, the last 3 are about looking ahead to the future:

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1. What you learned over the holidays

Whether or not you assigned homework (if you did, I'll get to it with #2), students can learn from the most unexpected places and experiences. Do a class survey: what did your students learn over the holidays? You may like to keep this very English-focused (e.g. a word/idiom you learned from music, travelling, reading, TV, social media) or broaden it to other areas of life. For context, when I asked this, one of my students told me he'd learned the entire choreo of NSYNC's Bye Bye Bye (more recently reprised in the Deadpool and Wolverine movie). Now, I didn't ask for further details so I don't know how that came about but I can only applaud the commitment to such an absolute banger of a song.

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The January pick-me-up you didn't know you needed

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2. Homework review with a bit of individualisation

If you did assign homework, you know that reviewing it can feel like a bit of a drag - between students who have only done some, students who haven't done any, and students who didn't know there was any/are confused about where they are now, and all the inevitable AI-generated homework treasure hunt, you're left with less energy than that cat who just woke up. A way to avoid all this is to meet the learners where they are: in other words, start from their experiences with the homework. Ask them to share, for example, one thing they found difficult, one thing they didn't understand, one thing they used AI for (honesty is not guaranteed but whatever you can gather is a valuable glimpse into their thought processes), one thing they liked, one thing they asked for help with. Starting from their experiences, you can then focus on checking things and giving feedback, while giving those who did less (or nothing) an opportunity to catch up a little.

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3. Remember as much as you can

I don't know about you, but the question "now, where were we?" has at times elicited the most astonished stares from my students. But you do need to pick up where you left off - whether it's a page on the coursebook or a topic you covered at the end of December. Rather than feeding everything to the students, turn the remembering into a game: in groups, the students list everything they remember about the topic. The group with the best memory wins. This may sound silly but it actually practises actively recalling information, which strengthens learning.

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4. Your word of the year

In the spirit of looking ahead to the future: if you've ever set new year resolutions, it will come as no surprise to you that most resolutions fail. That's why a couple of years ago I switched from resolutions to something much simpler: words. Each year, I try to set a word that I like to remind myself of throughout the year based on what I feel my life is lacking. Last year's word was "balance"; this year's is "healing". Ask students to choose a word that they would like to have to inspire their year - at school, but also beyond school. Then, each of them explains it to their partner, and then to the whole class. Depending on how challenging and perhaps (overly) personal the activity might be for your students, you can give them the option to share orally or in writing, via a Padlet. It might also be nice to create an interactive word cloud with their 2026 words (I generally use Mentimeter or Slido for this).

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5. The anti-resolution

Having established that resolutions often don't work, one activity you can do instead is ask your students to articulate one thing they don't want from this school year. I encourage students to keep this education-focused as this pushes them to analyse their shortfalls and think of how to improve them. Examples are procrastinating, using AI too much, forgetting the homework, getting distracted with technology, and so on. A very simple activity, a bit of a win for metacognition.

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6. Plan ahead

You may not have everything planned down to every last detail yet, but in most schools, the next few weeks are busy and you're (unfortunately) left chasing grade after grade to feed the bureaucracy machine. Taking a bit of time to chart the course for the next month or so together with your learners can help them with the very important skill of planning. I think I have overlooked this at times as a teacher, only to find later that my students were quite naively unaware of what was coming up (i.e. tests for the most part) and, more crucially, were not yet capable of managing their time in anticipation of future milestones. You can help them with this by discussing what you have planned for the next few weeks before the end of term, invite questions and encourage students to plan accordingly. You can also ask them to produce a visual representation of this calendar and display it in the classroom.

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And that concludes today's newsletter! What is your word for 2026? Which activities have you used to motivate yourself and your learners for the year ahead? If you use any of these activities, let me know how it goes!

In the meanwhile, I wish you a great start of the year and a lovely Sunday.

Take care, dear teacher ✨

¹ Which also means: if I haven't got back to your email, please accept my heartfelt apologies. I'm slowly getting through the email backlog and I promise to respond as quickly as my hands can type while safely connected to my brain.

² Little known, perhaps mildly worrying fact about me: I really like legalese. I adored studying legal translation and interpreting, so I'm excited to dust off that knowledge and discuss school laws with you with the appropriate terminology!

³ A self-reminder that one of the things I'd like to accomplish this year (you'll notice I didn't use the term resolution because I'm not feeling very resolute at the minute) is to cook more and to cook more things. Fun fact for you: the idiom "to be cooking with gas" (as in: "now we're cooking with gas!"), meaning that things are (finally) starting to progress, seems to come from an American Gas Association​ advertising slogan from the 1930s.

P.S.: My weekly suggestion for things to listen to/watch/read to improve your English while relaxing: A thought-provoking musical perspective if you're interested in women's rights or are covering the Suffragettes/feminism in class: Labour (the cacophony) by Paris Paloma.

✨Cool things I heard this week

I passed the concorso with 98 after only studying for one month (quite a lot, including evenings, but only a month). How did I do it? With your course! Very well organised and efficient for those who don't have a lot of time, like myself.

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