Tag Archives: vocabulary

Word of the Day: To Remind, To Remember and Tool to Send Reminders

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Today, this section Word of the Day, has a double aim. On the one hand, it is going to help my students see the difference between these two verbs “remember ” and “remind” and on the other hand, it is going to serve as an excuse for showing you a little tool to help you remember things.
Some of my students have problems seeing the difference between these two verbs, so here’s a written explanation and a short video explaining this difference. I recommend you to see the video first as it’ll definitely serve a double purpose, that of helping you improve your listening ability and at the same time solving your doubts regarding these two common verbs.

  • If you remind somebody about something, you make them remember it. It is a transitive verb, i.e. it always has an object which may be followed by to + infinitive or a that-clause.

                   Remind me to set homework at the end of the lesson.
                   Cristina reminded us that the exam  had been brought forward to Tuesday

When you say that someone or something reminds you of sth/so. you associate it with a memory from your past.

                       This boy reminds me of a boyfriend I had when I was at university .

  • If you remember, you have an image in your mind of a person, place or thing that happened in the past.It is very often used with a to+infinitive

                          I’ll always remember the first time I saw him

                         Remember to buy bread on your way home

In summary:

People ARE REMINDED of things. (it doesn’t appear in their head)
People REMEMBER things. (it does appear in their head)
REMEMBER = Person doing it themselves
REMIND = Other person making someone else remember

Click to do some EXERCISES . Link 1, Link 2

What is a good way to remind  people of things that need to be done without seeming like a nag? Is there a way to politely remind people to do things? Yes, there is: it’s called RemindPost and it is a simple, free service to let you send reminders to people or to yourself  and be notified when they’re done.

It works like this: You email someone a task. If they don’t mark it complete by the time you specify, both of you will be notified.

Hope you find it useful!

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A Game to Practise Spelling with Teens

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Yes, yes… here I am again, struggling to find ways to teach my demotivated students from E.S.O. That’s why I’m constantly surfing  the net  looking for different ways to teach the same things over and over again.

This game can be used to revise vocabulary from the lesson and at the same time practise spelling. It goes like this:

♥ Divide the class in two teams, A and B and ask them to invent a name for their team.
♥Then, divide the backboard into two halves and mark each side  of the board for each team.
♥ On each side of the blackboard draw either:

• a river with stepping stones for students to get across the river. The winner is the team that crosses the river first.   For every correct word they write, mark a stepping stone.


• a ladder. The winner is the team that climbs the ladder first. For every correct word they write, mark a step on the ladder.
• a mountain with climbing points for the teams to climb and put their country’s flag up on the top. The winner is the team that climbs the mountain and puts their country’s flag up first. For every correct word they write, mark a climbing point.
• a daisy. The winner is the team whose daisy is wiped out first. For every correct word they write, wipe out a petal and after all the petals have been wiped out, then wipe out the leaves and the stem until the whole daisy has gone.

♥Call a member from each team up on the board and dictate a word from their vocabulary to them. The students write the word they hear on their side of the board making sure at the same time that the student from the opposite team cannot see what the other student is writing. So cheating is eliminated.

This has proven a very nice and exciting way to check spelling, listening comprehension and pronunciation in a fun way.

Many thanks to Barbara Koziori for this idea

There are also lots of sites on the web to practise spelling with the typical hangman game so if you have a little time to spare ,why don’t you try some of these?

http://www.hangman.no/ divided into categories ( Harry Potter,Countries of the World , Musical Instruments..etc

http://www.playhangmanonline.com/ also divided into categories , namely, music, sports , geography …etc

http://www.englishbanana.com/hangmanhome.html and that’s the place you want to go if you want to play the game with colours, everyday adjectives or household things.

If you are feeling creative or just need a specific category to work with (as is my case) , you might want to create your own hangman. To do this try this site http://www.what2learn.com/. It’s good fun!

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Learning Chocolate… learning vocabulary

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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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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!

Lesson Plan: At the doctor’s

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Let this post be written in memory and as my tribute to my father, if not a good (I’m not the one to say), at least a well-respected doctor among his colleagues and patients. Let this post be a  far too late explanation of why I didn’t choose to become  a doctor when I/ we knew that it had always been my father’s dream.
During  my childhood and adolescence I lived surrounded by scalpels, syringes, pills,… several rooms in my house were dedicated to my father’s private  practice (there was not a Seguridad Social center ). I have seen  too much blood  and bleeding to last me a lifetime and it certainly took its toll on me. I’m going to save you the gory details but one of my earliest memories is knowing there was a piece of frozen lip in the kitchen freezer from one of my best friends’ brother ( a dog had bitten him). My father always dreamed of one of his children following his line of work but we all disappointed him. I wouldn’t like to be a doctor and the reasons are several.

• All my life I have seen my father being woken up in the middle of the night and leaving home in a hurry
• All my life I have dreaded the telephone ringing in the middle of our Christmas’s dinner and even sometimes we opened up our presents while my father was away healing somebody else
• All my life I have seen my father being verbally assaulted in the streets by patients who didn’t understand that he was not working and he, having the patient of a saint, answering all their doubts and above all, listening.
• All my life I have seen my father worrying to death about a patient
• All my life I have heard people criticising doctors for making mistakes, not prescribing enough pills or too many pills, seeing patients too fast or too slowly. I have seen my father cry over the death of a friend when he, who presumably, had the power, could do nothing to save him. Dad!! You were not God!

There’s a long etc of why I have never considered being a doctor but all my life I have seen my father dedicated to a job that he loved. A good doctor is more than academic excellence, it requires more than brain and skill it is also about compassion, kindness, humanity, tolerance, sensitivity and I like to believe that my father possessed all of them.

Here’s a lesson about Going to the doctor’s I have prepared for my pre-intermediate students. You’re warmly welcome to do it.

Click here