Now, I promise this will be the last post about Halloween but I took some nice pictures of our Halloween party at the high school and I wanted to show you how much fun we had and how hard students worked; because not only did they spookily decorate our common room and prepared the games for the party but , they also cooked delicious creepy dishes,which I’m afraid are right now sitting comfortably around my hips.
Anyways , thank you guys for making our Halloween celebration a big creepy crawly success!!!
Enjoy the video!!!!!
Tag Archives: students
Writing Elementary (A1): Write about a popular group
It’s not easy to find writing activities that motivate students 
but Writing about Music is one of the most popular among teenagers. From my point of view, at this stage of their learning, writing should be partially guided and this is what this activity suggests.
This is the writing task my A1 students had to undertake. I thought I might share it here as I always find it hard to find activities such as this one. Hope you find it useful, too!
Step 1. Students think of a group they know and like and then they provide the following information about their group.
Name:
When popular:
Members of the group:
From:
Instruments:
Songs
Step 2. Students write about this group , using their notes above.As I suggested , at this stage students need a lot of help and encouragement , so it’s really a good idea to give them a model they can refer to.
This is the model I gave them
The Fray are a popular group in the United States and all over the world today. In the group there are four musicians: Joe King, Isaac Slade, Dave Welsh, Ben Wysocki . They are all from the USA. They sing, write songs and play the guitar, the drums and the piano. Two of the group’s most popular songs are How to save a Life and All at Once.
Step 3:I decided to give my students an extra point if they gave a presentation about their group in class. Most of them did and they even brought along some flash drives with the group’s most popular songs.
Presentations given by Karen and Alice . Thank you girls!
Who said English is boring?
Writing and Speaking Elementary : Describe a game
Of all the skills a student has to become fluent at when learning 
a language writing is, for me, the most boring one. I don’t think it’s the hardest by any means, this prize is awarded to Speaking but the truth is that students find it boring and we, teachers, almost always put off marking essays for as long as we can.
On the other hand, I find that it’s much easier for students to write a worthy piece of writing if you provide a model, some guidelines to follow and also give them a topic they are mildly interested in .
Last week’s topic for composition was Writing about a Game. I asked students to think of a game or a sport and answer the following questions
♥What’s the name of the activity? ♥How many players are there? ♥ How does a player start the game?♥What do the players do then?
I also asked some students to record their work and this is what they did (I used a tool called Fotobabble. I wrote about Fotobabble here). Thank you folks, good job!
Lucia Gonzalez Hide n Seek
Alba Feito “Marbles”
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Carolina Macas The Handkerchief
David Díaz The Liar Dice
Merry Christmas and Happy 2012
This is a funny video my students from the second year and I have created to wish you a very Happy Christmas and a very Happy 2012.
We hope you like it! We have certainly enjoyed creating it, haven’t we?
Teachers being taught!
I’m still at the high school. I can’t complain. It has been my own decision and nobody said it was going to be an easy path to walk . Teaching highly motivated adults is very easy, there is no argument here! But teens, oh my goodness!
Lack of motivation in some rural areas has been an ongoing problem for some time and this big crisis is not helping much.
On the other hand, I find it really challenging to find new ways to motivate my unmotivated and/or under motivated students. That’s why when I suggested they try and be teachers for one day designing some strategies to revise the grammar for the Present Tense and two of my students showed a tiny bit of enthusiasm I readily encouraged them. Sadly, one of them didn’t come up to my expectations, so it’s not worth mentioning but one of my students ,Eva, did really well. She revised the present tense, she wrote some exercises for her classmates to practise and she even made us play TIC TAC TOE, which we had been using for Frequency Adverbs and Interrogative Pronouns. This is a picture of Eva below. Well done, Eva ! Teaching is in your genes!
