I've always been someone that likes fixing things, making things and crafts. As an English teacher to young learners, when I'm not learning instruments I like coming up with different activities, to overcome grammar obstacles. Teaching vocab is pretty easy for me now, I feel I have a range of activities that keep the kids interested and maximise participation. The challenge is to have as many children involved as possible. Often in teaching a class we break the class into teams, but many times this results in in one person from each team actively involved. With little ones this results in the others loosing attention, and the noise level rising. I still use these activities, but sparingly. My class sizes at my new school are the biggest I've taught, 32 per class. I've found breaking them into 8 groups of four, and having at least two at a time, and having stronger and weaker students in each group, enables the group to run itself, with the stronger students there to help facilitate this. I can then find the weakest group and focus on getting them to function, before moving through all the groups. I'm so happy when I can just stand back and see a whole class engaged, with 50% of the students talking, and the rotation through the students is quick enough to keep attention spans.
I've been teaching for nearly four years now, and long ago I realised that knocking something together for one lesson is a waste of time. So when I make something, I make it well. I have taught across a variety of text books, so I know the vocab and grammar obstacles they face and to teach, and what all the books miss that will be in their tests (such as lime). The students seems to appreciate when something is 'nice' and treat it well, so thy survive being handled by hundreds of 5-8 year olds. Colour printing is a little more costly, but when you know it's not just for one lesson, that cost dissipates. Kids seem to enjoy random, not knowing whats coming next, and in many ways this forms the backbone of my approach to engaging activities.
I now have around 3000 mini vocab cards, in sets of 16. I've come up with a way to to create dice that are strong enough and indestructible to 5 year olds, but won't hurt when they accidentally bounce of a head (I use these for more than just numbers, with emoticons on each face to discuss feeling, or ticks and crosses to indicate positive and negative answers, which can then be combined with other dice or vocab cards), spinners, magnetic fishing rods.
Along with my massive colouring pencil set, variety of balls, fly swatters, I doubt there is another teacher as well resourced as I am teaching ESL.
I still feel I am becoming stale, so I am constantly looking into new ideas and working on new projects. Even tough it's my job, someone once said of me, that they never saw me any happier than when I was making something. So it stills feels like a hobby to me when I am working on something for class.