Como seguramente sabeis,Photopeach ( la herramienta que utilizo para hacer los role-plays) ha decidido hacer limpieza general 
justo ahora , por lo que los videos creados antes del 6 de junio no se podrán ver durante algunos días. Pity!!
Ahora mismo, de los publicados solo podeis ver :” at the train station” y estos que acabo de hacer.
At the police station .
At the Antiques Market
Your passport , please!!
Sorry but I’m up to my eyes in exams and I haven’t been able to dedicate one single moment to my blog. But I promised I’ll try to publish some more role-plays and I won’t go back on my word. So here’s a new one: At the train station. Click here if you want to see the instructions about how to study with this video or if you are used to them , stay on the blog and just watch the video. I have introduced a new feature: the role of the examiner, which you’ll clearly see as it is being introduced by the photo of a teacher. I hope this helps!
Another amazing tool . Blinkx claims to be the largest and most advanced video search engine. It is said to have an index of over 35 million hours of searchable video .
Users can search for video content , create personal video playlists, or build a customized Video Wall .
This is the video wall I got from typing the word: celebrities.
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Let this post be written in memory and as my tribute to my father, if not a good (I’m not the one to say), at least a well-respected doctor among his colleagues and patients.Let this post be a far too late explanation of why I didn’t choose to become a doctor when I/ we knew that it had always been my father’s dream.
During my childhood and adolescence I lived surrounded by scalpels, syringes, pills,… several rooms in my house were dedicated to my father’s private practice (there was not a Seguridad Social center ) . I have seen too much blood and bleeding to last me a lifetime and it certainly took its toll on me. I’m going to save you the gory details but one of my earliest memories is knowing there was a piece of frozen lip in the kitchen freezer from one of my best friends’ brother ( a dog had bitten him).My father always dreamed of one of his children following his line of work but we all disappointed him.I wouldn’t like to be a doctor and the reasons are several.
• All my life I have seen my father being woken up in the middle of the night and leaving home in a hurry
• All my life I have dreaded the telephone ringing in the middle of our Christmas’s dinner and even sometimes we opened up our presents while my father was away healing somebody else
• All my life I have seen my father being verbally assaulted in the streets by patients who didn’t understand that he was not working and he , having the patient of a saint, answering all their doubts and above all, listening.
• All my life I have seen my father worrying to death about a patient
• All my life I have heard people criticising doctors for making mistakes, not prescribing enough pills or too many pills, seeing patients too fast or too slowly. I have seen my father cry over the death of a friend when he , who presumably, had the power, could do nothing to save him. Dad!! You were not God!
There’s a long etc of why I have never considered being a doctor but all my life I have seen my father dedicated to a job that he loved . A good doctor is more than academic excellence , it requires more than brain and skill it is also about compassion , kindness, humanity, tolerance, sensitivity and I like to believe that my father possessed all of them.
Here’s a lesson about Going to the doctor’s I have prepared for my pre-intermediate students. You’re warmly welcome to do it.
Still on the subject of sports , today let’s focus on a writing activity where you’ll have to make use of lots of things learnt this week, namely
What to do?? Simple!!! Look at the following pictures. What do they all have in common? Exactly!! They’re all sports.
What do you have to do? Choose a sport and give a good definition for it, mentioning everything you know about it as regards equipment, rules of the game, where you can practise it…etc. make sure you do not write the name of the sport as we, readers, will have to guess the name of the sport you are describing.
Need a dictionary? Here : Monolingual http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Bilingual http://www.wordreference.com/es/
Ready??
If only I had known first I’d have paid more attention to my mother when she persistently tried to teach me and my siblings good table manners ,but when you are a child you can’t see the point of not getting a bit of fun out of flinging crusts of bread, making a mashed potato snowman or getting my brother and sisters’ hair red with tomato sauce (my mother would have never allowed ketchup to enter her kitchen) . 
My mother was educated in a nun’s school. It was a time when subjects such as Maths or Languages were not as important as knowing how to knit or embroider . In a way it wasn’t as different as the education received by the female characters depicted in “Jane Eyre” by Charlote Brontë or in “Pride and Prejudice” by my very much admired Jane Austen.
One of the things my mother was taught was good table manners and since me and my siblings were very young we were insistently reminded of things such as keeping elbows off the table, eating small bites ,sitting straight, placing the napkin on our laps and …. a long etc I’m not going to bore you to death with .
What I didn’t know and have just found out is that good table manners can help you lose weight so as I’m a bit on the plumpish side my mother might not have taught me so well .
That’s why I have paid careful attention to this video where Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, an Australian and an etiquette expert, explains how good table manners can help you lose weight.
Watch the video and if you have time to answer some questions or do the whole lesson plan I have prepared for my pre-intermediate students on Restaurants and Food , click here.
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I never say “no” when one of my friends phones me to suggest going shopping . I love it!!!
Although I like going shopping a lot I don’t see myself as a shopaholic: I am definitely not a compulsive shopper although I am one of those who sort of view going shopping as a hobby. It helps me relax but I certainly do not spend money I do not have and I am not drowning in debt because of my purchases . Well, this is what I tell my mother every single time she tells me off for wearing new clothes.
Anyway , this is a video from the film Pretty Woman , which I’m sure all of you have seen.
You can do three things:
♦ Just watch and enjoy it
♦ Watch the video and do some exercises Here
♦ Do a whole lesson plan on going shopping Here
And now that we are on the subject what about learning some expressions containing the word shop?
→ talk shop
if people who work together talk shop, they talk about their work when they are not at work
Even when they go out in the evening, they just talk shop all the time.
→go window-shopping 
to go about looking at goods in store windows without actually buying anything.
Joan said she was just going window-shopping, but she bought a new coat.
→shop around (for something)
to shop at different stores to find what you want at the best price.
You can find a bargain, but you’ll have to shop around.
→be like a bull in a china shop
to often drop or break things because you move awkwardly or roughly.
Rob’s like a bull in a china shop - don’t let him near those plants.
Fortune telling, palm reading, tarot, physic reading, clairvoyance, onomancy ,numerology,horoscopes and the whole lot. There are countless ways of predicting the future and there are lots of people , even politicians who consult fortune tellers to help them take decisions.One good example is Hillary Clinton ,US Secretary of State.This is said to have happened between the fortune teller and Hillary when she was Senator.
During a recent publicity outing, Senator Hillary Clinton snuck off to visit a fortune teller of some local repute. In a dark and hazy room, peering into a crystal ball, the mystic delivered grave news.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just be blunt: Prepare yourself to be a widow. Your husband will die a violent and horrible death this year.”
Visibly shaken, Hillary stared at the woman’s lined face, then at the single flickering candle, then down at her hands. She took a few deep breaths to compose herself. She simply had to know. She met the fortune teller’s gaze, steadied her voice, and asked her question.
“Will I be acquitted?”
Have you planned your summer holidays yet? Are you in the mood for something different? Weird and even wacky? Are you tired of the conventional hotels everybody goes to? Have a look at these photographs .
These are some of the weirdest hotels you will ever see. But don’t hold your breath ..some of them are very expensive and most of them are fully booked for this summer; so I guess, it must definitely be an experience for some people sleeping in one of those but, trust me on this… you won’t find me there!
Given the chance I don’t know whether it ‘d be easy to choose one of them to spend a nice relaxing holidays. I guess you think it would be a rush of adrenaline sleeping in a cabin hanging from a slender tree but I know for sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink waiting for the branch to crack.
And an underwater hotel… are they paying me???
In my humble opinion ,the Survival Pod Hotel in The Hague, this orange alien-shaped thing, seems to invite people to choose to die if the option is living in these claustrophobic capsules. Can’t imagine having to pay for it!
Some other picturesque pictures show the Das Park Hotel, Ottensheim in Austria and I have to admit that, at least, it has been cheap to build. The idea is that you sleep inside a piece of concrete sewage pipe and guess what?? This is cheap …’cause you pay only what you think they are worth!!
As for me, I’ve always felt an attraction for luxurious hotels where the service is impeccable , the views from the balcony breathtaking, the place a haven of peace and relaxation and the bed as comfortable as a bed should be. I don’t want to spend the night killing cockroaches or freezing to death just to have the time of my life ,thank you very much.
Anway, why this post on Weird hotels? ’cause my students are about to study this lesson and I came across some of these pictures while looking for different things on the web and I prepared a lesson about hotels this morning , which I thought I’d share with you. So, if you are interested ,and you’re not one of my Pre-Intermediate students (we’ll be doing this lesson on Monday, God willing!) Click here .
If you are one of my pre-intermediate students and still want to do something about hotels, you can click here and listen to this postcast about Weird Hotels.
And then watch this video… but don’t expect it to help you with your English!!!
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Food! Food!! Food for thought! Always nice to learn something so useful. Nive way to teach too when it is as funny as doing it using this amazing tool which borrows pictures from Flickr and allows users to input sentences, phrases or even entire paragraphs and then turn them into illustrated slide shows .
Why don’t you try your own images and share them? Have a look at what I’ve done.
Ways of cooking
http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=17840
Kitchen equipment
http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=17841
Taste:
http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=17844
What’s the difference between Sour and Bitter?
1.Take a drink of Vinegar : This would be sour or so considered to be.
2.Take a bite of Real pure dark chocolate: This would considered bitter
1.A Grannysmith green cooking apple would be sour
2.Coffee without sugar or cream would be bitter
Sour lemons and limes, or unripe fruit before it becomes sweet.
Vegetables
http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=17846
Enjoy your meal!!
