Lesson Plan: Verb “to be” and Interrogative Pronouns

Lesson Plan: Elementary, , , ,

It’s never  easy to find stimulating real-life   activities for elementary students but on one of the few ocassions I was watching TV  this week  I saw a TV commercial that  I thought I could use to revise the verb “to be” with my elementary students.
The ad campaign for 212VIP CH is led by the top Australian model Catherine McNeil and accompanying her on the TV commercial is Spanish model Jon Kortajarena. Enjoy!!

And now, let’s concentrate on Interrogative Pronouns with the help of the  invaluable Photopeach. This is for my youngest students .I hope it helps you !!

Learning Chocolate… learning vocabulary

Resources, Vocabulary, ,

Learning Chocolate… I wonder why they’ve chosen this name for a website that helps students improve vocabulary but it certainly does so and in a very efficient way.
There are lots of vocabulary categories to choose from ranging from the easy  Numbers or the Seasons to the more sophisticated Insect Life Cycle.

How do you learn with this page?

Choose a category and begin to learn by choosing from five different activities. Every exercise is taught and revised with the help of pronunciation: for example , in some games you have to match the audio to the word or the words to the pictures and you can also do  a ” fill in the gaps” exercise or a dictation.

What I specially like about this site is that it uses visual aid to help students learn better and faster and at the same time  teaches them how to pronounce  .

So,  I was going to point out that working  with Learning with chocolate  you kill two birds with the same stone but noooo…. you kill four birds … ’cause you can learn Chinese  Mandarin or Japanese too. As always , the choice is yours!

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Free Audio Books

Audio, Resources, ,

When I am in the gym trying to sweat my kilos away I’ve sometimes considered not listening to music and  instead ,making a better use of the time I spend there. Today I’ve bumped into this page and I have thought :” That’s what I was looking for!” So instead of running with Lady Gaga I’m going to start running with Jane Austen, Mark Twain or Virginia Wolf.
In Books Should Be Free you can find a lot of free audio books divided according to their genre: adventure, comedy, romance, fairy tales, poetry…etc and you can download them in mp3,iPod or iTunes format . Now, you have no excuse for not practising English, even when you’re at the gym!!

Word of the Day: Turn over a new leaf

Word of the Day

The idea for this post came from the image of Lady Gaga at the MTV video Music Awards wearing  meat  and just in case wearing a dress meat was not enough, her hat, boots and purse were also made of meat and also, just in case her attire went unnoticed  she asked Cher, who was giving her the award, to hold her meat purse.

But what does the expression to turn over a new leaf mean?

It means to make a fresh start, to change one’s conduct or attitude for the better as in

Lady Gaga promised her fans she was going to turn over a new leaf and stop wearing fur coats

But what’s a leaf?  This is a leaf → 

So playing with the meaning of the expression “turn over a new leaf ” and the word “leaf” the rather provocative group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ) has launched a campaign seeking to stop the cruelty of the fur industry and has prompted designers to stop using fur in their designs. The photos below are part of this  campaig . I have put together images of Lady Gaga and models volunteering for PETA. You choose, the options is always yours!

Writing can be fun

Writing, Writing skill

And this is another superb site I strongly recommend. There are lots of sites that help you improve your listening skills but Writing Fun by Jenny Eather is one of the few sites I have seen that really helps you improve Writing. Poor writing skills is an issue almost everyone tries hard to overcome but we find it really hard because we never seem to have enough time to go through all the steps that good writing requires and that’s where Writing Fun helps you. Let’s see how to use it

♥Choose the type of text you want to write:narrative, description, persuasion, letters,emails,invitations…

♥Read the different examples mousing over the tips on the right to see the examples

♥Print it  or

♥Write online with the help of the text organiser.

Isn’t it just great!!