Thursday 5 November 2009

An imaginary trip to London

My students have made a presentation about London. It is such a nice job that I thought It would be a good idea that everybody could have a look onto it. The idea was that every student was assigned a monument or a particular place in London. Each student prepared a slide with a short text on it.

Wednesday 17 June 2009

Marking Written Exams

It was many years ago. I realised one of my teachers wrote strange abbreviations in my exams, but I could never find out what they meant.

When I deliver the exams I have corrected back to my students, I always have the sentation that they return them to me and they don't know why their answers are wrong. I sometimes think they complain about silly things.

If they stopped to analyse their answers and why they are wrong, very probably, they would have good reasons to complain.

What I did is, I created a number of abbreviations I could easily write as corrections and If agreed with my students, they would understand why they made mistakes.


Marking Written Exams

Cheers for now.

Monday 11 May 2009

Simple Present

  1. Please read the explanation about this tense and do the activities below. These activities have been made by a very intelligent teacher, Mrs. Isabel Perez.
  2. Once you have finished, you can read some more about this and do the activities in the lower side of the page.
  3. Probably your teacher has already mentioned that sometimes there are spelling problems with the verbs. Click in here and you can have more practice.
  4. I suggest you do these ones as well or maybe you´d like this one as well.
What do I have to do now?

Watch this video


Please open an account in google and load up some photographs of yourself doing different things.

Link the photos in an email and send to the address your teacher tells you.

Thanks.

Thursday 7 May 2009

Telling the Time in Enlgish

We are trying to work together in order to prepare a few didactic units for next year. We are supposed to be receiving many computers at school after September. This is my first unit:

To begin with, you have to know how to tell the time in English. Follow this link, read and learn.

But you´d probably like to watch a video and check how it sounds.


Or probably you´d like to see some more examples. Please read this presentation.



This one is also really nice, I´m sure we are going to learn a lot toguether reading this one:



You probably need some more reading about it and probably you can start now and do an exercise online.

Did you know there´s a very famous song about the time? Whatch this video, it´s fantastic!



How about reading the song lytics to know what is all about?

There´s nothing like having fun while learning. So, shall we play? Read the introduction, ask your teacher if you don´t understand and follow the link witht he games.

Have a nice time.









Monday 9 March 2009

Hey There Delilah

A couple of days ago I had access to a song I did not know. I introduced the song to my students and the experiece was quite successful.

I include a link to the written activity as well as I am going to embed the video with the song we listened to.



Plain White T´s are a pop-punk band from Chicago, Illinois. They are best known of their acoustic song "Hey There Delilah", which reached No.1 in the American Top 100 in July 2007.

Did yoy konw?
"Hey There Delilah" was written about an athlete at Columbia University called Delilah. The singer was obsessed with her, but they never had a relationship.

Wednesday 14 January 2009

Seasons and Celebrations


When I first started teaching English, I was told I had to include international celebrations in my school syllabus. I understood I had to prepare special activities to make students aware about the world around them. Examples of these dates were “The International Peace Day”, “The International day for Human Rights”, etc.

At the beginning of every school year, editors and editorials send us free copies of their new publications so that we can recommend new titles to our students as for further or complementary reading. Of course, those graded readers are designed to improve our student´s skills, but I have to confess I read them myself from time to time. One of these booklets was “Seasons and Celebrations”. Once I had read the second page, I was absolutely delighted at the dates, details, names and historical events mentioned on it.

Immediately after, I asked my students to write an essay about the next important celebration in the Anglo-saxon world. It was Saint David´s celebration. I was very satisfied with the results: language, culture and world knowledge could be improved with the same task.

I am also a fan of computers myself and one of my hobbies is reading computers magazines. I read an article about “google calendars” and I learned that you could clip a calendar on your blog.

The conclusion for both reading experiences was that I could remember special dates myself and share a calendar with my students. Thus, language and culture would be taught hand by hand and together.

Happy ner year if you happen to read my first post this year.