Word of the day: hilarious

Word of the Day, ,

hilarious /hɪˈlerijəs/ adjective = extremely funny

    1

  1. Some people don’t like his comedy, but I think he’s hilarious.
  2. She gave us a hilarious account of her first days as a teacher

                                                                                       Source: Merriam Webster

Fancy watching a  hilarious clip about an Iraq soldier speaking English?

Spelling Revision with Spelling City

Audio, Create your own stuff, Games, In the Computer Room, Vocabulary, , , ,

We are almost on holidays and students are beginning to feel the heavy burden of passing all their exams. It’s never too late to start studying, is it?

English spelling is difficult. There is no point in pretending otherwise but… nevertheless, students have to learn to spell so let’s choose a motivating activity to speed up their learning.
I plan to take my students to the computers room and use the excellent website Vocabulary and Spelling City.com.

Aim: to revise the spelling of words and practise their pronunciation.

Procedure:
♥Assign a computer to every student (or alternatively to every two students)
♥Tell them they are going to help their classmates revise the spelling of some of the words studied in this course. Decide on the numbers of words you want to revise and ask students to go to the website Vocabulary and Spelling City.com
♥Students type the words in the spaces provided and click on the button Spelling Test. .See pictures below.
♥Ask students to stand up and choose a different computer. Students click on Say It and Sentence to guess the hidden word and type it. Click Check me to see your score and then there is the possibility of clicking on the button Teach me where the word will be spelled.
♥You can ask them to repeat the procedure and revise new words. They will surely love it.

If you want to read a bit more about English Spelling, click here

You might also want to read:

Bravo Rafa! and some tennis vocabulary

Word of the Day,

Great, great Rafa! Although he was not at his peak, he was hungry for the prize  and Rafa Nadal has just won his 6th Roland Garros title and  maintains  his top position in ATP rankings which, in case of losing this final ,  he might  have given to Djokovic. And what is more, he  has equaled Bjorn Borg’s record of six Roland Garros titles .

Have you seen the match? Could you understand the umpire? Tennis has got a lot of words that might be Greek to some of you. If you want to learn what some of them refer to , read the list below to learn some of them and then next time you watch a tennis match , listen for these words you have just learned.

♥ATP Association of Tennis Professionals. The ATP are the governing body of the men’s professional tennis circuit.

♥Serve the shot that begins each point, in which the server hits the ball after tossing it into the air

♥Love no points

♥Match point the last point that a player needs to win in order to win a match

♥Ace a very fast serve that your opponent cannot reach with their racket

♥Deuce the score in tennis when both players have 40 points.

♥Lob a shot that is hit in a high arc, usually over the opponent’s head

♥Tiebreaker an extra game played to decide who will win when both players have six games each.

♥Rally a long series of shots

♥Let a service that hits the net and must be played again

♥Grand Slam the four most prestigious tournaments; Wimbledon ,Roland Garros and the U.S. and Australian Opens

♥Crosscourt a shot in which the ball is hit diagonally across the court

♥Advantage used for saying the name of a player who scores a point after ‘deuce’ , For ex: Advantage Nadal

If you feel you want to learn more vocab  about tennis, click here. Thank you Rafa, you are a legend!

Human Bingo to Revise Irregular Verbs

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I got this wonderful idea from Mel Wawen although I have slightly modified it. As she explains, it can be used as a warm up before the lesson or at the end of it when students feel they have had enough of English,

This time I needed to revise Irregular Verbs and this is how I did it.

  • I asked students to tidily sit individually and in rows of three or four.
  • Then, I asked each of them to choose an irregular verb from the ones we had studied. I told them to write it down in its irregular past form on a piece of paper.
  • Every row is a team, so they should make sure every student in the same team has chosen a different irregular verb.
  • Tell them you are going to say a verb at a time, using the infinitive form. When the students hear the infinitive for the irregular they have chosen, they must say the irregular past form aloud and then sit down.
  • The first team with all the students sitting down wins the game.

Follow up:

I used this game when they first learned there was something called irregular verbs. It was funny and it only took about three or four minutes.

The second time I played this human bingo, students also had to write a sentence containing the irregular verb. After checking that their sentence was grammatically correct, I made sure they knew how to pronounce in wors in their sentences.

It was their turn now. They had to stand up and read aloud their sentence but without saying the verb. Students in the class had to provide the right verb in the past to fill in the gap.

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