The following article which was written by Lindsay Clandfield is taken from the MacMillan Education on-line teaching resource site.

'Tis the season to be silly

Does the grind of teaching in hot weather get you down? Do you feel that you and your students have done one grammar exercise too many? Or do you just need a bit of a spark to lift your course? Never fear, the silly season is here to save the day.

The silly season runs from mid to late summer when silly stories emerge in the news. It's the time of year when there are fewer important political stories, mainly because government is in recess. Silly season stories tend to be about moral panics, animals or celebrities.

How can the silly-season work come to the rescue in your class? Well, for a start, many teachers like using newspapers as an authentic reading source. Some of these silly stories are perfect for use as light reading.

Students can be encouraged to find what they think are the silly stories. If you don't have access to English language newspapers, go to newspaper web sites (British ones are particularly fruitful) and gather together a cross-section of articles, serious and silly. Explain the term silly season and then ask students to select ones that they think fall into the "silly season" category. You could even organise a wall display of the best/silliest stories.

British newspapers even do stories about the silly season during the silly season. The Guardian web site has a true/false quiz on silly season stories. "A Berlin driving teacher drove for 43 years without a licence because he was too nervous to retake his first driving test," is just one of the stories included in the quiz. You could create your own bogus silly stories and see if your students can pick them out.

Finally, why not create a class newspaper called the Silly Season? Students can write short news items about the school (good for summer schools), poems, short stories or opinion columns. Get someone to take some photos and then put the whole thing together. This kind of project will give your class a motivating objective and can make a great memento for students at the end of the course, especially if you include photos.

Not silly at all, in fact.