I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. T. Jefferson
Spelling Revision with Spelling City
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
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Bravo Rafa! and some tennis vocabulary
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
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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Word of the Day: Thesaurus
A Thesaurus 
is a reference book in which words with similar meanings are grouped together ( it contains synonyms and sometimes antonyms).
Try this site and see how a Thesaurus can help you online.
Writing can be a daunting task when you cannot quite think of just the right word to convey your ideas without sounding redundant and boring. A free thesaurus online is an invaluable resource offering expedient gold mines of vocabulary. To check thesaurus sites available can also be time-consuming. However, one site that will place thesaurus synonyms at your fingertips is thesaurus.net. Our free thesaurus online resource offers a thesaurus dictionary online where your only task is to enter a word you find yourself unnecessarily overusing. This English thesaurus will quickly provide an array of possible synonyms that can be used to enhance writing.