Understanding “some” Spanish

Audio, Funny Stuff, Listening, Resources, ,

What I’m about to show you is a good example of why English, after all, should not be considered such a difficult language to understand, especially if you compare it to understanding some Spanish native speakers.
Have fun!!!

No kidding now!!If you need to improve your listening skills, why don’t you visit this site? You won’t find any comprehension questions after the audio but you might consider it interesting and useful. The site belongs to the New York Times and it’s a collection of stories of people from New York. Click on the image and it will lead you straight to their homepage.

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Playing with images: Bookr

Create your own stuff, Resources, Vocabulary

Playing? Working? Teaching?Let’s not beat about the bush and call a spade a spade …yes , I am playing , playing with images . It is my firm conviction that when you see something you remember it better. That’s why , once again, I have used the same tool I used when teaching Food and Cooking : PimPamPum . This is a version called Bookr , and as its name suggests it creates photobooks using Flikr images. The photobooks are very simple to create, you just need to type in a key word to find the images you want and then drag them onto the pages and add what you need to be taught and illustrated.
I think this a nice way to teach parts of the animals and I’ve also added some idioms containing animals that need to be studied. 

Animals by Cristina

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Subtitling Videos: a nice way to practise

Audio, Listening, Resources

So, let´s imagine that lately you ‘ve been having some problems with understanding listening comprehension and all of a sudden ,you realize it’s May and you’re taking your listening test in about a week or so. In that case, there are so many good websites I would recommend that I could keep you busy for the whole year. Today ,let me show you something that I bumped into quite by chance.
It’s a place where you can find subtitled videos and what’s more, you can even request for some videos to be subtitled too. This place is called SubPLY .
As we are learning about food and cooking I tried searching the site by writing the word “food” and I found quite some interesting videos where you can revise vocab.
Why don’t you try it and let me know what you think? Now, click on the image and it’ll link you to their website and ,from then on, you can do your own search.

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Are you a Cat or a Dog Person?

Lesson Plan: Advanced, Listening, The English language, Word of the Day, ,

Well, this person you are going to see in the video is ,without doubts, crazy about cats. This is what would happen to me if I had to live with even one cat , let alone 130 as this lady… no wonder she’s called the crazy cat lady. Hey! No offence meant I’m just repeating what everybody seems to think about her.Honestly speaking, I admire what she does and I only wish I had the guts to do the same with my beloved dogs.
Now watch the video and if you fancy answering some questions about it. Click here



And as we are on the subject , how about learning some idioms containing ” cat and/or dog” ?
From the popular ” it’s raining cats and dogs” there’s a wide range of idioms containing these two words. I’m just going to write the ones easy to remember and whose meaning can easily be inferred from context, but bear in mind there are plenty of others.

The 32-year-old actress spent a large proportion of the week playing cat and mouse with the press
We were planning a surprise birthday party but Jack let the cat out of the bag and now she knows about it
I had a dog’s life at school: I was always being beaten.
After years of neglect, the old artist’s work was recognised and honoured: every dog has his day.

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Recipe: Spaghetti with Vegetables

Cooking, Students' Corner,

Kindly written by Ana Rebollo

Ingredients:
• 400 g spaghetti
• 4 tomatoes, cut in half
• ½ cup sliced courgettes
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 red pepper, chopped
• 1 green pepper, chopped
• ½ cup vegetable stock
• 1 teaspoon salt
• thyme
• pepper

Directions:
• In a pot of boiling water add 1 teaspoon of salt and cook the spaghetti until al dente. Then, remove the pot from the fire. After that, drain and set aside.
• While the spaghetti is boiling, chop the onion, the red and green pepper the tomatoes and then slice the courgette.
• In a saucepan over medium heat, add ½ cup vegetable stock. When it´s boiling, first add the onion and after a few minutes add the pepper, courgette and the tomatoes and continue cooking for about 15 minutes. Season with salt, pepper and thyme.
• Scatter the sauce over the pasta and serve.