Articles: my own material (almost)

I like making my own stuff (without sounding suspicious). It allows a bit of creativity, and when you have to use such a horrible useless nonsense book like NH, well, sometimes it's the only thing you can do.
So today it was articles, which for a class of Arabs and Czechs and Koreans was a real struggle, but thanks to James Bond it worked well.
So all you do is: find an extract from a book (can't, for the life of me, can't remember where that reading came from), a very short passage about James Bond and someone named Mary and a guy from KGB.
Give it to the students with random questions to answer (being the last thing on my mind I had to make them up as I was writing on the board, so it was all about "who do you think Mary is" and "what do you think will happen next").
Write a couple of examples on the board, test how much they know of why in one there is "the" and in the other there is "a".
Go throughsome examples and rules.
A matching exercise (from sentence to explanation) is useful, at this point: I found a good one in "Trouble with articles" or something like that (have tried to find a link on Amazon, no such luck). Of course the students will want to do the other exercises as well, which is just fine as they are dialogues and spot-the-mistake kind of exercises, so it's good.
Finally, take the reading back (I made them turn the page over so that they couldn't read it), and give them the same reading but with gap-fills: I have never seen them so interested as in those 10 minutes (excluding an idiot who doesn't deserve more attention here than what he gets - not - in class. Seriously, nothing hurts an attention-seeker more than not getting attention, and I am soooo good at ignoring people when they annoy me. Unfortunately for him, I always give people 3 chances, and he burnt his 3 within 5 minutes of the first day in class).
Optional: snakes and ladders from New Cutting Edge pre-intermediate Teacher's Book: meant to be a 20 minutes game, it turned into a 50 minute-tournament...
Optional 2: Skaterboy from New English File intermediate TB; a song is always appreciated, and in today's case, it was a good way to conclude, since it also goes quite fast, so even if they had to predict how to fill the gaps before listening, it was still tough.

Big smile! Tomorrow it's speaking day, mostly, Friday will be food and easy stuff, maybe a category game, then at 12 half the class will leave to go to the Mosque, so I'm nearly done. And next week it's L5, so, back to my pre-intermediate. Hopefully I'll have "small Abdullah", who is fun to teach. Shame I'll have to leave "big Abdullah", who has been renamed "sweet Abdullah": you look at him and melt, nothing but that.
I love this class:-)