The benefits of the Now Teacher's Resource Book

The Now Teacher’s Resource Books offer not just teaching notes to make the most of each lesson with the Now series, they also provide you with practical tips to be used before the lesson as well as with a lot of additional ideas to help you deliver the best possible Now lesson.

 Lesson notes

Probably most of you are looking at the Lesson notes while teaching and taking advantage of the useful advice that is included for each stage of the lesson. These Lesson notes give detailed instructions on how to organize the activities and teach the structures in each lesson. You’ll find approximate timings here, so you’ll know whether you’re on target to finish at the right time. If you’re ahead of time, there are optional activities marked in grey, so you could include them. There’s also some very useful advice on how to make the coursebook’s activities simpler or more complex. For all exercises, you get the key; and for the listening exercises, there’s a copy of the audio script.

Sprinkled throughout the Lesson notes, you’ll find various teaching Tips. For example, in TRB A2.1, Unit 1, NIC, p. 19 it’s explained that it is important to change pairs / groups when doing pair / group work. And you can find various ideas how to do this during your lesson in the TRB’s appendix.


Optional & additional materials

Before you go into the classroom each week, turn to the back of your TRB and you will find the section called Optional & additional materials, including that most precious of the TRB’s resources, Photocopiable activities. At the beginning of this section, have a look at the pages called Getting ready for …, which are divided into two sections for most of the steps: FYI … and Preparing … to help you get the most out of your Now lessons.

FYI … (www.klett-sprachen.de/networknow/fyi) directs you to the klett-sprachen website for extra information (Landeskunde) about the subject of the step, for example, in TRB A1 Starter, Unit 1, Step 1 FYI … takes you to a link to the Lake District National Park’s homepage. In TRB A1, Unit 5, Step 1 you can read some funny announcements that London underground train drivers have made on the website you are taken to. And in TRB A2.1, you’ll find, amongst other things, extra information on the Post Office services in Great Britain, on aboriginal culture, on Antartica and on one of Great Britain’s wildlife experts, Sir David Attenborough.

Using these links to authentic material before you go to your lesson, will help you feel more confident about the subject matter of the step you’ll be dealing with in class and prepared for any questions from your students. So having familiarized yourself with the theme of the step, you can think about the preparation for the actual teaching itself.

Preparing … offers some additional activities for each step if you have some extra time during your lesson, or if you want your students to have the chance to consolidate their learning. Many of these extra activities use the photocopiable materials at the end of the TRB, so you may need to think ahead if you need access to the photocopier. The instructions and timings for using these activities are all included in the Preparing … section. There’s also advice about at what point to use them in the lesson, so that you can optimize their impact. And there are notes on how to integrate the Language and culture texts and tasks in the classroom.

And the Preparing … section also identifies the additional downloadable activities which have been specially written for each step. You can find all these activities here.
And don’t worry if you don’t have time to use them during the unit or step itself – you can use them as revision later in the semester.

So don’t forget the FYI … and Preparing… in the Optional & additional materials towards the back of the Now Teacher’s Resource Books. Use them to help you make your lessons the best possible!