My new favourite website

Could www.futilitycloset.com be one of the greatest websites of all time?
From a teacher's point of view it may well be. It's a compendium of weird of amusing anecdotes, fun linguistic facts and brainteasers, many of which would be brilliant for advanced English learners.
Here are a few of my favourites so far:

Puzzles:

• Thrilling Peril
• Hopping List
  
• The Stars Align
  

Short texts:

• The Value of a Dollar
• Special Delivery
  
• One Solution
  

And also:

• Thorough Enough
  

New post at "Tatty Jackets"

Easily the most interesting textbook from my collection, "Pleasant English" is a textbook for German schools from 1939, published before war was declared between Britain and Germany. It traces the learning curve of a German family who have recently moved to England, but adds a sprinkling of nationalist, political comments to avoid "an unworthy idolisation of all that is English" (my translation).
Read all about it here.

English Life and Thought

A little background: on the rare occasions that I manage to dig myself out from the mountains of vocab cards that accumulate around me, I go to flea markets to find old English textbooks. Here's one from 1927. Hop over to my other blog for a full description with pictures, quotes and everything.

Inspiring photographs

Intriguing, artistic, topical, and sometimes amusing pictures can be found on the websites of most news sources, for example:

• The Guardian's 24 hours in pictures
• The BBC's In Pictures
• Reuters' Signs of the Times series

These can be used for all kinds of warmers and fillers, for all levels:

Beginners:

• Name as many things as you can in the picture.
• How does the picture make you feel? (choose from a list of adjectives)
• Guess the country / situation

Intermediate:

• Tenses practice: What is happening? What has happened? What is going to happen?
• Brainstorm adjectives to describe the picture.

Advanced:

• Describe the picture to a partner so they can make a rough sketch (good for designers, marketing students)
• Speculation modals: They might be doing... They must have been...

You can also get a lot of mileage out of the captions, from a straightforward "match the captions to the right picture", to a Call My Bluff type activity (give teams the real captions and get them to write two fake ones).