And summer has finally come and once again it’s this time of the year when me and my blog go on holiday.
I started blogging like eight years ago and you might think that after spending all these years writing an average of two posts weekly, I might be dry for ideas. I am not. I promise I’ll be back some time in September with new ideas.
This blog is always growing and changing, and hopefully it’s becoming better and a more useful place for you to visit. I hope that when you click away from my blog you feel inspired encouraged and even challenged. This year the blog has reached an amazing number of visits, 300,000 visits/month and I can only thank you for your support and your kind encouraging messages.
These are the most popular posts this year and also some of my favourite ones.
It’s a site that freely provides graduated reading material for English language learners and teachers. It has more than 500 reading lessons. Every lesson comes with free audio, a free printable worksheet and a free multiple choice quiz.
The site offers 5 categories, but the most interesting ones to help enhance your reading comprehension ability are “Fun English” and “Academic English”. This last category is full of lessons and quiz questions for beginner, low intermediate, intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced students.
The site is run by Neil Millington, a university EFL lecturer in Japan.
This lesson is aimed at students with a language level of B2 (upper-intermediate) and focuses on revising, learning and using vocabulary related to homes, houses and rooms through a variety of engaging activities.
Task 1. Revising, introducing and using vocabulary.
♥ Part 1. Mind mapping.
Ask students to work in pairs. Write on the board a mind map as the one below to help them revise vocabulary related to this thematic area. Allow them some minutes to complete their mind maps and get feedback from the whole class, completing the mind map on the board with their suggestions. Then, give them handout 1, explain difficult vocabulary and ask students to talk about the kind of house they live in and their favourite room in the house.
♥ Part 2. A Game
This part requires some preparation. In advance, you need to find two rooms in a house belonging to two famous people.( see mine below)
Ask students to work in pairs. Student A faces the board and Student B sits with his back to it. Display the picture of a room with the OHP (if you do not have one, stick the picture on the board) and ask student A to describe it in as much detail as possible to his partner. Student B, using a clean standard A4, needs to draw the room. It would suggest beginning the description of the room by saying where the big things in the room are: windows, doors, sofas/beds etc….
Once they have finished, they compare with the original and have a good laugh.
Elicit some adjectives of personality and start a class discussion about how a room can reflect the owner’s personality. Ask students to try to guess what kind of person the room belongs to.
After the discussion, surprise your students by telling them it belongs to a very famous person in their country and ask them to guess who this person might be. Show them.
In this part, students in small groups will talk about some home-related issues. Questions will be introduced by short videos, which will hopefully encourage discussion.
♥ House of the future (I’ll use the first 3 minutes)
After watching, students discuss the video and these questions:
What will the house of the future be like?
Will we have robots to help with household chores?
Do you think houses will be more environmentally friendly in the future?
Houses use a lot of energy. What things could be done to make houses more energy efficient? What sort of energy do you think will be used to heat our houses?
♥ Renting out your house (I’ll just use the first two minutes of the video)
After watching, students discuss the video and these questions:
Have you ever used an accommodation sharing site?
Have you ever rented out a property to tourists? Would you do it? What are the pros and the cons?
Would you rent out a room in your house to a lodger? Why (not)?
If you had a property to rent out, what kind of lodger would you prefer and why?
♥ Pallet House Project
The inspiration for the Pallet House Project came from the fact that 84% of the world’s refugees could be housed with a year’s supply of recycled American pallets. With one and a half year of pallet production in the US alone, 33 million refugees can live in a Pallet House.
After watching, students discuss the video and these questions:
What strange materials do you know of that have been used to make houses?
Is homelessness a problem in your country?
How difficult do you think is for homeless people to find a job, or get a house?
There are about 10 ideas for posts on my to-write list, but this is definitely a post I have meaning to write for a long time and that for some reason or another I never got around to writing it.
This post is not about English; it has nothing to do with vocabulary or grammar. It is just a post featuring two tools that might come in handy.
♥ KeepVid might prevent you from having a nervous breakdown when after spending Sunday afternoon preparing activities with content from You Tube or any other video site for the coming week, you find that Internet is not working. Sounds familiar? Of course, as well-seasoned teachers we can always resort to plan B or plan C, but isn’t it terribly frustrating?
Keep Vidis a handy tool for downloading video. As they advertise on their site:
Keep Video Downloader is a free web application that allows you to download videos from sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch.Tv, Vimeo, Dailymotion and many more. All you need is the URL of the page that has the video you want to download. Enter it in the textbox and simply click ‘Download’. KeepVid will then fetch download links in all possible formats that the particular site provides.
Remember that if you want to download videos from Facebook, you will need the url. You can get it by right-clicking on the video to get its hidden url.
♥ Downsub.As for the second useful tool, how handy could it be to have a tool that downloads subtitles from YouTube? Very!
Well, this is what http://downsub.com/ does for you. The only thing you need to do is enter the url and choose the language.
Hope this blog post has been helpful! Keep posted!
