Blog de Cristina A NEW LANGUAGE MEANS ANOTHER VISION OF LIFE

I don’t know about you, but most of my thinking time happens when I am driving all alone in my car. This is mainly because that must be about the only time in the day I am alone- Hey, I am not complaining here but it’s difficult to do any decent thinking we you spend all your day surrounded by teenagers - my own and my students. So, here I was, in my car, driving to work and thinking about the best way to teach Adverbs of Manner to my students when I remembered an exercise I did while taking a course in  IH London.The idea is to combine Adverbs of Manner and Intonation in a very funny way, though to get to the funny part of the exercise there are, first of all, some steps to climb.

Step 1. This is the boring part. On the board I write the adjectives I am going to use in Step 3 and ask students to form the adverbs of these adjectives. (see worksheet ).

 Step 2. Now it’s time to start working with intonation. I draw on the board a stave and demonstrate the power of intonation with the word Thank You! It might be necessary to repeat the expression a few times before students associate pitch with meaning
-low pitch= sarcastic, depressed, negative
-middle pitch= neutral
-high pitch = very positive

Students in pairs practise a few times.

 Step 3. Still with the adverbs on the blackboard I give each students a slip of paper with the adverbs of manner : furiously, quickly, cheerfully (Worksheet here). Students now stand up and in pairs tell each other the words I LOVE YOU  using the correct pitch to convey the way they feel. The other student should be able to guess the adverb written on the card. Students move around the class talking to as many students as they can. Time limit: 5 minutes.

Step 4. Feedback : students ,now, read their I LOVE YOUs aloud for everybody in the class to guess the adverb of manner.

Learn English and Have Fun!!

I really need to frame it somewhere to read it first thing in the morning  as a reminder  and definitely , before teaching certain groups of students. 

I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.”

Haim G. Ginott, Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers

 “What do we say to a guest who forgets her umbrella? Do we run after her and say “What is the matter with you? Every time you come to visit you forget something. If it’s not one thing it’s another. Why can’t you be like your sister? When she comes to visit, she knows how to behave. You’re forty-four years old! Will you never learn? I’m not a slave to pick up after you! I bet you’d forget your head if it weren’t attached to your shoulders.” That’s not what we say to a guest. We say “Here’s your umbrella, Alice,” without adding “scatterbrain.”
Parents need to learn to respond to their children as they do to guests.”
- Haim G. Ginott, Between Parent and Child: The Bestselling Classic That Revolutionized Parent-Child Communication

Writing is probably one of the most difficult tasks students have to tackle but it is also true that we never dedicate enough time to improving this skill ; there never seems to be enough time during lessons .Added to this is the fact that we are not used to writing in our own language , let alone in a foreign one. Therefore, what we normally get from our students are short sentences which usually fall short of our expectations.
In this session I have used two activities ,slightly modified ,from two different blogs ; Stretching a Sentence (original source here) and the Verb Shaker (original post here, )

♥STETCHING A SENTENCE
I have created a PPT presentation (see below) to heighten the idea of a telescopic sentence.
The main idea is starting with a verb or a noun and stretching the sentence by giving the students some hints in the form of questions (who,when,where,what,why). In the end, they easily and effortlessly come up with a sentence that has some consistency and that I hope will help get them rid of their fear of writing. This exercise does not focus on complex sentences as it is aimed at elementary and pre-intermediate students. It might also be necessary to point out that previous to this exercise, we have worked on the order of adjectives before the noun (basically Opinion+Size+Age+Colour) so you can imagine how colourful their sentences were.

Are in the mood for singing a Christmas Carol? Wouldn’t you like to be Christmas shopping and hear Jingle Bells or White Christmas and be able to sing along?

Christmas Shopping???? Don’t panic or yes… start panicking !!!!If you’re just like me , as soon as I hear the first Rudolph the Red - Nosed Reindeer in  the shopping center , I know  the countdown begins. Only two weeks until Christmas and I haven’t even started thinking about what to get for my family , let alone gone gift shopping . I slowly begin to panic while my sister keeps pestering me , claiming  that she has already bought everything in September and that everything my children will want might already be out of stock by the time I make up my mind to go shopping. And then , every single year I promise myself (and my sister) that next year I’ll go gift shopping in summer even though the only thing I might be able to buy is a summer hat!

Well, I’ll stop rambling now and tell you that I learned about this site Esolcourses.com through one of my colleagues Rosa Valdés. I am planning to dedicate one session to singing Christmas Carols with my  students. The added bonus for my students  is that the Christmas Carols are sung by  famous singers such as lady Gaga, John lennon or Christina Aguliera , and the added bonus for me is that carols are already sorted into levels with their corresponding activities.

This is one of the videos we can find on this site. Thanks for sharing Rosa!

Anyway, the website has also got a very good listening section , which I highly recommend.

Today is Monday and to be honest here ,I am not a big fan of Mondays. I’d rather it were  Thursday or if  I push myself a bit, Friday. But today is Monday and there is no way around it. For the past two weeks I’ve marking exams like crazy . I don’t really mind checking Listening or Reading Comprehension tests. I might not even mind marking Grammar tests but when it comes to reading Essays I really wish it were Friday or even summer. When I was a teenager at the high school I used to say that if I ever were a teacher I would just not bother to mark exams , up in the air they would go and the ones on the right would pass while the others would fail. But now I’m on the other side and I only wish my conscience would let me do it, but it doesn’t and so I’m stuck with tests and I keep correcting the same mistakes all over again.

Funny cartoon or reality hitting me!

If you’ve been reading me for some time you’ll probably have guessed that I favour kinesthetic learning.The activities where students take an active part and enjoy while learning are my favourite .I like them getting up and moving around the classroom and I even welcome the noise because it is English what they are using.

And you cannot even begin to imagine how proud I feel when I see that they have been able to overcome their natural shyness at making mistakes and just concentrate on using the language and having fun.

These are the two activities I used to orally practise present continuous. Hilarious, trust me!

♥MIMING

I divided the class into two groups Group A and Group B; one student from Group A comes up to the front of the class and is given a card with a sentence containing the Present Continuous , like for example : I am watching TV. The student has to mime this activity and the members of his group have to guess , exactly, the same words written on the card. The student is given one minute to mimic as many sentences as possible.

Suggestions

I’m cleaning the house

He’s cooking an egg

She is dancing in the disco

I am playing the guitar

He is drinking a coke

He is reading a novel

I am thinking about my teacher

My mother is working now

He is walking to school

He is painting the house

I am studying History

I am not sleeping

I am playing tennis now

She is reading a newspapr

She is eating chocolate

I am riding a blue bicycle

♥DESCRIPTION OF A PHOTO

For this activity the students are sitting in pairs, one student facing the board and the other with his back to the board. Using the OHP ,a picture of people performing something is displayed . Now , the person seeing the picture has to describe it in as much detail as possible and the other person has to draw the picture. Allow them four or five minutes and then choose the best picture. Below are two of the pictures that I used:

I cannot think of a better way to start a course than with music and MacMillan and I must be of the same mind here ’cause your first unit is all about music. Let’s start the course in high spirits and do a song. All these singers are mentioned in the  unit. Vote for the one you’d like to sing along with. Just once, please, we don’t want to be cheating here , do we?
Tool used: www.blogpoll.com

Homework : link is on the right bar. It says Present Simple. Do everything but the pronunciation of the “s”.You don’t need to print anything, just do it online at your pace. enjoy!