Blog de Cristina

Present Perfect : Grammar and Exercises

Cristina Cabal — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:06:12 +0000

I know the school year is almost over -hooray!!! , but it is never too late to let students have a look at some of the things they will be learning the coming year. Present Perfect is not an easy tense to use, especially for people from Asturias (we never use this tense if you are wondering why) but after doing these exercises you’ll soon get the knack of it.I swear!

Word of the Day: to Cheat

Cristina Cabal — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 06:32:08 +0000

Done! I have finished marking exams , and now what is left is something I really hate, red tape . Writing , sometimes, useless reports nobody will ever see but which are, nevertheless, part of the time-consuming red tape a teacher has to necessarily fill in at the end of the course.

So finals are over and I’m glad to say I haven’t caught any students red-handed. Come to think of it, if any of my students is reading it , he might be laughing his head off thinking how naive we, teachers, sometimes are. Anyway, I’m happy in my blissful ignorance!

♥ To Cheat on Someone: to be sexually unfaithful.

They got divorced because he was cheating on her

♥ To cheat in an exam/ to cheat on an exam

None of my students have cheated on their final tests.

Useful Posts to Revise for Finals

Cristina Cabal — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:20:48 +0000

I have been meaning to give MentorMob a try for some time and I never got around to doing it but when my studets asked me where to revise for finals , MentorMob flashed in my mind and I saw the light. ;).

This little tool allows you to organise your favourite posts or websites into a playlist in a very easy way and then you can always share it and embed it in a blog or website . In this way you can easily organise videos,pdfs, documents,websites, articles….. into playlists and then assign them to your students in the computer room, as homework or in a flipped classroom setting .

Create your own Playlist on MentorMob!

And the Winners of the I Recorded Short Story Contest Are….

Cristina Cabal — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:54:11 +0000

……(fanfare of trumpets) María López ,Montse López and Claudia Seivane in no special order. It has been a tough decision to make and though my original intention was to give just one prize , I’ve been totally unable to make a fair decision. For this reason, I asked some of my colleagues to help me decide and they faced the same dilemmas as me as the three of them deserved to win for different reasons . María and Claudia are hard-working thirteen-year-old students with a promising future in languages and Montse , though older, was up to her eyes with exams and still found the time to write a long short story. My thanks to the three of them for trying so hard and to the rest of my students who have also participated with more or less fortune. Many thanks to them all.You all deserve your prize!

Here are the winners and their stories:

Claudia Seivane Otero : Falling in Love in 1955

María López Valdés: Surfer’s Paradise

Montse López Fernández: The yellow Flower

Below these lines are the rest of the participants with their short stories. They all deserve to be published !

Click on the icons to listen to their short stories and to see their names

And Last but not Least…

Lidia’s short story : Hello Ann

Ruben’s short story

Ainhoa’s Short story

Estela’s Short Story : The Small Pirate

Typing Phonetic Symbols

Cristina Cabal — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 05:58:26 +0000

It’s six o’clock in the morning and already awake. Bugger! Today is the day I don’t have to teach first period but my mind doesn’t seem to know and has already decided it’s time I get down to some serious work so I’ve decided to turn on my computer and listen to the amazing voice of this guy ,James Arthur , apparently the winner of the XFaxtor. I am not a follower of this programme but the truth be told I think he’s got that kind of voice I could fall in love with and, to top it all, I have just heard his version of the song “I’m sexy and I Know it” originally sung by Lmfao and I can’t hardly believe it’s the same song. Well, I just wanted you to know.

Anyway, I wanted to share with you this tool that can come quite handy when working with phonetics .You can find it in a blog called Random Idea English, which is worth a visit. Here’s what it looks like ; you just need to type and copy/paste. Here’s the link .Easy peasy!

Here’s the song and the guy I was telling you about. By the way, he is also the one singing the latest hit “Impossible”

Words in a song: by one’s side

Cristina Cabal — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:23:55 +0000

This is the third cropped song of the series “Words in a song”. If you want to see the Whys and the Hows of this exercise , follow this link to the first song in this series.

This time I’ve chosen the song Mirror by Lil Wayne Ft. Bruno Mars and the highlighted expression is ” by your side“.

Steps :

♥Orally , introduce the word you want students to learn, giving examples and asking them to infer the meaning.

♥Choose a song that contains the word or words you want to teach

♥Crop the video with tubechop; you don’t want to play the whole video.

♥ Students listen to the cropped video and identify when, in the song, the highlighted word(s) has been used.

♥ Second time: students do a fill- in- the- gaps exercise or any other king of exercise that takes my fancy.

♥ Third time: students sing along

♥ HOMEWORK: Now, very important, students need to go home and write a sentence containing the highlighted word(s) . Ask for vonlunteers to translate the cropped song .

Here’s the cropped version and the corresponding lyrics with my proposal for blanks.

LIES,WHY,CORRECT, FRIEND, MIRROR,NOBODY, UNDERSTAND,WINDOW

[Bruno Mars]
_____ on the wall, here we are again
Through my rise and fall
You’ve been my only _____
You told me that they can ______ the man I am
So _____ are we here talkin’ to each other again

[Lil Wayne]
Oh, I see the truth in your _____
I see _______ by your side
but I’m with you when you ‘re all alone
And you ______ me when I’m lookin wrong
I see that guilt beneath the shame
I see your soul through your ______ pain
I see the scars that remain
I see you Wayne, Im lookin at the..

When I Grow Up

Cristina Cabal — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 17:34:17 +0000

“When I grow up I’m going to be a flight attendant” I used to tell my parents when I was in primary school. That was really my dream! I used to dream of going to far away countries , meeting amazing people and learning to speak different languages . I dreamed of holidaying in Indonesia and swimming in the Pacific Ocean … but my parents never liked it and very soon tried to put me off the idea by telling me flight attendants were just waitresses in a plane , but still… I dreamed!

Even now, if someone should ask me if I ever wanted to be a teacher , my brain automatically associates ” wanting to be” with “being a flight attendant”. For better or for worse , I’ve got a friend who is a flight attendant and when she tells us about her travels I always turn green with envy. I cannot help it but that’s called rubbing salt into wounds, isn’t it?

Anyway, this is the question I asked my students and these were their answers. I thought it could be fun to take their picture now so that, in the future ,they can look back and see if their dreams came true.I hope so!

View the slide show

Reported Speech Questions Nicely Explained

Cristina Cabal — Fri, 31 May 2013 06:08:30 +0000

Why should revising be boring? A nice way to revise Reported Speech Questions

Having Fun

Cristina Cabal — Thu, 30 May 2013 06:04:52 +0000

I should be marking exams and then again preparing a new batch of them.Oh my Gosh It is that time of the year!!Instead I am playing with Classtools.net.

One of my students asked me to do some more practise on Reported Speech Questions and I thought this could be a nice way to revise this point of grammar.

Click on the numbers to see the questions ! Don’t you just love it??

Going to the Doctor!

Cristina Cabal — Tue, 28 May 2013 06:15:22 +0000

This is a lesson I created about three years ago. As it often happens with my lesson plans I have written some of the exercises myself , while some others have been taken here and there; in this case , some of the tasks link to a website ELLA,which I highly recommend not only because it is run by some of my colleagues from different EEOOII in Asturias but also because it is the best I have found so far that offers , for free, lesson plans where you can work all skills.

At the time of creating this lesson I wrote a post dedicated to my father that you can read here. He passed away a few years ago but I still miss him and think he was the best doctor ever and not just because he was my father and girls always think the best of their fathers but because ,when treating his patients, he relied more on instinct and experience than on books and this is essential to a doctor.

Click on the picture advertising the lesson plan if you want to do some practice.Level: A2