Tag Archives: fun

Lyreach.com : learning through songs

Audio, Grammar, Listening, Music, Resources, Vocabulary, , , , ,

I can’t imagine life without music but much though I love listening to it when I’m driving, working, relaxing or having fun, you won’t see me bringing music to the classroom just because. There is always a reason to choose the song I ask my students to sing. It could be either because it contains a certain structure we are working with or because of its vocabulary or its phonetics, but there is always a reason
This is why when I bumped into this site lyreach.com I was thrilled as it offers the possibility of typing words or idioms or structures as you might expect to get them in the lyrics. The lyrics of about 470000 songs are stored so the hard part is choosing which of these songs you would like to work with. Then you click on your choice to see the paragraphs that it appeared in, the title of the song and the singer and sometimes a clip from Amazon.com
In this case I was looking for a song containing Adjectives with too and enough and this is what I found.

You might be interested in having a look at these songs:

A Word on Grammar:Reported Speech Questions and Orders

A word on Grammar, , , , , , ,

Walking towards the end of the course we tend to feel rather stressed and pressed for time  and I’m not the exception. But I don’t really believe that an awful amount of time will be saved by not introducing new grammatical points in a nice way.

This is how I introduced Reported Speech Questions and Orders. This time it was the traditional way of teaching, ie, chalk and blackboard  and I’m not good at drawing so needless to say, my students had to use their imagination to guess that I was drawing a little girl and her mother.

The truth is I did little more than guiding them. My students named the characters and provided the questions. I only had to set the atmosphere -which was a four-year-old girl pestering her mother all day long with questions  -and from there, we had the husband coming back home and her mother complaining about their talkative daughter.

Grammar here, Exercises here ,here and here

Realizing they were learning and “sort of” enjoying themselves I continued with the story and went on to teach Orders and Requests in reported Speech, the girl being 15 years old in this context and, as it’s usually the case, the mother now pestering the girl to do things (I’ve got a 15-year-old son, as you have probably guessed)

Grammar here . Exercises here.

And now that we are on the subject, why not continue with the story and use it to introduce suggestions in reported speech?

Using jokes to teach Grammar: ESLjokes.net

Funny Stuff, Grammar, Resources, ,

Why the hell (excuse my enthusiasm) does a lesson have to be boring when you can teach grammar using jokes and unbelievably the only thing you have to do is a click away.
ESLJokes.net offers us ready-made lesson for teachers and for students. The jokes are graded as elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate and upper intermediate/advanced and they cover lots of grammar points from present simple to reported speech.


If you are student, you can use them for autonomous learning because it also provides the answers to the exercises and if you are a teacher, then this is just pure heaven! Everything done for you!
I’m planning to use the one about the Penguin (please, see Intermediate) to teach reported speech and I’m sure my students will be glad to have reported speech introduced in this way. Wouldn’t you if you were a student?

Write a comic with www.writecomics.com

Create your own stuff, Funny Stuff, In the Computer Room, Resources, Writing, , ,


It’s never been easier to write a comic. This fantastic site http://www.writecomics.com/ allows you to create your own comics in just a few minutes and you don’t even need to register.
It’s great to do with your own students in the computer room or, alternatively, set this task as homework. I can almost see my students’ faces lighting up when I tell them.

How to do it:

♥Choose a background by clicking on your choice

♥Choose the people or the animals. You can also add props and/or aliens

♥Then, the speech bubbles, as many as you need

♥Type the text

♥If you change your mind about something, double-click to delete it

♥Add as many scenes as you need

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The only thing I don’t like about this site is that you cannot save or embed your comic strip, but. you can copy the url or use a screen capture program to take a picture of it and then embed it into your blog.

Some ideas:
To practise tenses
To write role-plays
To make an interview

Word of the Day: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Funny Stuff, Listening, Word of the Day, , ,

This saying first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek  and as you’ve probably guessed it means that different people have different ideas about what is beautiful, something I totally agree with. Don’t you?

But what is beauty? According to scientists, beauty has to do with symmetry combined with some gender-specific traits. For example, for women : full lips, large eyes, small jaw and nose ; and for men: squarer jaw, deeper-set eyes, full lips. Can you think of anybody with these traits? I surely have  some in mind. All right ! Time’s up! Stop daydreaming and go back to reading!

By the way, did you know that women’s perceptions of beauty change throughout their menstrual cycle? I know it sounds a bit weird and I don’t want to believe it but unfortunately this is what research shows.

Anyway, this is a brief (or rather not so brief) introduction to what I wanted to say from the beginning of this article  and this is  that beauty is nothing without brains  and the video below is proof of this.

I’m planning to use it with my elementary students, who are now studying the semantic field of FOOD.

Want to give it a go? Yes? Great!! So, now, watch it and then answer the following questions (if you want to do the hot potatoes exercise, click here)


1. What does the girl order?

2. Where  are they?