Today is on me- Let’s Go to a Musical Show !

Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Listening, Writing skill, , , , , ,

Who doesn’t like music? Today I am inviting you to take a glimpse at the Top Ten Musicals in London. Tough  job to choose one ! A video-based lesson you’ll positively enjoy!

Level: B1/B2

Skills :listening, writing and vocabulary

Step 1. WARM UP. In pairs, talk about the questions below

♥How important is  music in your life?

♥Have you ever been to a musical show? Why(not)?

♥Do you know  any famous musicals?

♥There are lots of things to do in London, would you consider going to a musical?

 

Step 2. Look at the following collage containing pictures of different musicals. In pairs, can you identify any?

Get feedback. Most possibly students won’t be able to come up with the names for all the musicals. If this is the case, show them the options below.

A. The Lion King

B. The Phantom of the Opera

C. Wicked

D. Mamma Mia

E. Thriller

F. Billy Elliot

G. Les Miserables

H. The Book of Mormon

I. The Commitments

J. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Step 3. Play the video  for the first time without giving students any task.After watching it , ask them whether they  would fancy watching any of these musicals. Students watch the video a second time  and fill in the gaps in the exercise below

 

Number 10. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Grab your won golden ticket and step inside the ____ (1) and wonderful Wonka Chocolate factory

Number 9. The Commitments.Originally a novel, then a hit movie, this musical is jam ____ (2) with classic soul hits

Number 8. The Book of Mormon.From the ____  (3)of South Park, this outrageously funny musical is not for the faint -hearted

Number 7. Les Miserables.An epic tale of broken dreams, passion, ____ (4) and redemption

Number 6. Billy Elliot.The ____ (5) story of a boy’s struggle against the odds  to become a ballet star

 Number 5. Thriller Live.The spectacular show takes you on an electrifying journey through Michael Jackson’s musical ____ (6).

 Number 4.Mamma Mia. Abba’s  timeless songs create the ultimate feel-good tale of love , laughter and ____ (7)

 Number 3. Wicked.The untold story of the witches of Oz has won 90 international awards and is loved by ____ (8) and critics.

 Number 2.The Phantom of the Opera.Andrew Lloyd Webber’s  musical ____ (9) continues to captivate audiences

 Number 1. The Lion King.Set in the Serengeti, this epic show explodes with glorious colours, stunning effects and  ____ (10) music

 Step 4. Vocabulary. Find a synonym for the following words in the video

-ageless

-impressive

-strange

-fight

-located

-prize

-full

 Step 5. Writing . You’ve been asked to create a poster to advertise your high school end-of-the-term musical.Use postermywall.com to create the poster and think of something to say about the musical to attract an audience . Use some of the adjective+noun combinatios below

Mapa Mental creado con ExamTime por cristina.cabal

ANSWERS HERE

Confusing Words

Speaking, The English language, Vocabulary, Word of the Day, Writing skill

Can you tell the difference between  farther and further or especially and specially? Do you know for certain when to use arrive in or arrive at?  Which one is American English at the weekend or on the weekend, math or maths? Is it think of, about, in or on?? Do you have problems using and/or pronouncing weigh, weighed and weight? You are pretty certain you know how to use boring and bored, but  does it work the same for stressed and stressing?  If these questions have raised serious doubts, then this post is for you. 🙂

Click on the picture if you want to go straight to the section

I sometimes have to remind my students  I’m not a walking dictionary !!  I honestly believe what makes a good teacher is not how many words  he knows in the dictionary or whether he knows a  given idiomatic expression. I don’t  think knowing what “stuck in a rut” means makes you a good  or a bad teacher. I firmly believe a good teacher is the one who loves his work and is able to transmit his love for what he does to  his students  and  is able to keep them motivated  whenever  they want to give up. I  have learned that being a good teacher is not teaching to those who want but to those who don’t.

Although initially English is not such a difficult  language to learn, it cannot be argued that for some students it is easier than for others. Take for example , a native speaker of Dutch or German  and a native speaker of Japanese or Russian. Obviously, German and Russian are closely related to English whereas  Japanese or Russian are completely unrelated so I’m sure   you can draw your  own conclusions in this matter.

Very often students tend to systematically makes mistakes with a given word either in its pronunciation or in the way it collocates with certain prepositions, adjectives …etc and we cannot forget here the issue of false friends which causes so many problems and, trust me,  sometimes funny misunderstandings, like in Spanish, the false friend “embarrassed ” and “pregnant”.

To help my students and readers of this blog overcome  these difficulties, I have created a new section in this bog called CONFUSING WORDS. I hope it’s helpful!

Lesson Plan: Dating , Family and Friends

Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Listening, Speaking, Vocabulary, Writing, , , , , , , , ,
Level: Intermediate
Topic: Dating, Family and Friends
Aim: To develop all four skills – listening, reading, writing and speaking .

Has our lifestyle changed so much that it has affected the way we socialise, date and  communicate with our family? Here is a nice visual lesson plan to talk about these issues TASK 1 Look at the picture below. Which of these adjectives would you use to describe the picture? Give reasons

Awesome   disgusting   funny   unreal   pornographic  sexist

romantic   interesting     unusual      provocative     depressing

Can you think of any more adjectives?

Task 2.  Introducing &Revising Vocabulary :   Dictogloss.

(Dictogloss technique here )

As I normally have large classes I have written two texts containing the target language so I will divide the class into two groups and I’ll dictate the texts in turns, following the dictogloss technique. Texts will be then written on the board or /and a copy of the texts handed out.

Vocabulary Handout 

TASK 3 SPEAKING

Has traditional dating become a thing of the past? Look at the pictures below showing different ways of dating. In pairs, discuss which ones you prefer, which ones you wouldn’t mind trying and which ones you would never try, giving reasons to support your opinion.

TASK 4. LISTENING: What makes for a good friend.  See on youtube

Time to improve your listening abilities. This time we are going to listen for specific vocabulary. Ready?

Listen to a man talking about  What Makes a Good Friend and fill in the spaces in the exercise embedded below.

 

 

 

TASK 5 . SPEAKING: A CLOSE FRIEND. Think of one of your close friends. In pairs, ask and answer these questions

  • How long have you known him?
  • Where did you meet?
  • Do you get on well? What do you have in common?
  • Do you ever argue? What about?
  • How often do you see each other?
  • How do you keep in touch? Have you ever lost touch? Why?

TASK 6. SPEAKING.

Students sit facing each other using the speed-dating technique. Some students remain seated during the whole event ( in real speed dating, women remain seated). When the bell rings, students sit across from another student and they use their questions to start a conversation. They need to keep on talking for 3 minutes. Then a bell rings and “men” need to stand up and move to their right to start a new conversation with a different partner and the whole process is repeated again. Instead of a  bell so I use a Class Timer (here).

Display with the OHP, on the whiteboard, the pictures with the questions and ask students to talk about the question on the picture for about three minutes. When the time’s up,  students change partners and a new picture is displayed.

I have created this slideshow with Google Sites.

 

TASK  5 Writing. Choose any of the questions in the exercise above and write an essay making sure you use the vocabulary you have learnt in this lesson. Do you need some inspiration? See what other students have written  here, here, here and here

I hope you’ve enjoyed the lesson!!

Six Wonderful Sites to Help you Write, Speak and Sound Better

Dictionaries, Phonetics, Resources, Speaking, Writing, Writing skill, , , ,

I’m not a native speaker. Even though I read, write, work and I would almost dare say live  and dream in  English, I haven’t learned the language from birth and sometimes have moments of self-doubt. These websites I am going to share in this post have been an invaluable help.

Blog de Cristina is also on Facebook. FOLLOW IT!

 

♥Howjsay  and Forvo: The world’s largest dictionaries of English Pronunciation

How often have you come across a proper name you had no clue how to pronounce and you desperately needed to know the  correct standard  pronunciation of or perhaps  a variant pronunciation of this word?  Let’s say you want to know the pronunciation of the word “selion”. You go to the most important online dictionaries offering pronunciation, but the word you’re looking up is not there and you suddenly begin to panic. At this stage you can do three things: panic, pretend you know how to pronounce it ( you just know how to sound British, no problem there) or look up the word in any of these two amazing sites that have saved my skin countless times.

♥Linguee

We all know how difficult it is to write, even more in a foreign language. More often than not we look up words in dictionaries only to find that it offers so many possibilities for the translation of the word that  we don’t know which one to choose for the context we need. In fact, sometimes it doesn’t help us at all but makes things more complicated as we don’t know which word to use to mean what we want to express and we end up completely frustrated. Here, Linguee can help us as it is a bilingual dictionary but  in context

♥Phraseup

Sometimes we know what we want to write, the sentence is phrased in our mind, but we can’t figure out some of the words we need. This is where phraseup*comes in. It assists you with writing, by suggesting possible combinations to fill-in the words you can’t remember. Each suggestion is accompanied by definitions, synonyms and translations to other languages.
Imagine you know there is an expression containing the words ” take” and “granted” but you have forgotten what goes in the middle, PhraseUp can help you here, too. Just type the words that you remember and put an asterisk * where you want the application to insert something. Very useful, isn’t it?

Or maybe  you want to use the verb+preposition combination “cope with” but you are just not sure which words it collocates with, just type it in PhraseUp and options will be provided.

♥Ozdic.com

I have been using ozdic.com for years and this is a dictionary I cannot live without. It is not any dictionary, it also help you to sound more natural when speaking or writing in English. Let’s  say you don’t know the preposition that collocates with the verb “insist”, or which adverbs sound  more natural with this verb; let’s imagine you need to use the word “idea” but you have no clue what adjective to use  apart from the overused “good “. Go to the dictionary now, this is just a sample of what you’ll find : bright, brilliant, clever, excellent,, marvellous | valuable, worthwhile | exciting, inspirational, interesting, stimulating | constructive, positive | absurd, bad, mistaken, ridiculous | , crazy, mad, outlandish, wild | half-baked | ambitious, big, grand.

The dictionary contains over 150,000 collocations for nearly 9,000 headwords and it is based on the 100 million word British National Corpus.

♥Text2Phonetics 

It is a wonderful tool that can save a lot of time if you need to transcribe something. I have tried it with small texts (two or three lines) and it’s incredible! You will be able to  pronounce a whole text perfectly .
Just paste the text you want to transcribe and click the Transcribe Button to get the transcription.

Some Activities to Talk Nonstop Using Comparatives and Superlatives

Games, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Speaking, , , , , , ,

It is still raining   .

It is raining again today. Of course it is raining. This is Asturias and we don’t get to be the dear, green place – Asturias “natural paradise”- without more than our  fair share of rain, but  I’m  beginning to get a bit sick with so much rain. I need the sun, or rather my mood needs the warm, delicious rays of the spring sun.

In class today, we need to deal with comparatives and superlatives.
This is the intermediate level so I don’t think, or perphaps it’s hopeful thinking, my students will need me to go over the rules for the formation of the comparative and superlative of adjectives and adverbs. Anyway, this is the easiest part; there are loads of sites on the internet with exercises to practise grammar.

I want this class to be highly communicative. I want my students to leave the class telling each other. OMG ! I’ve lost my voice! I want them to leave my class sounding funny, hoarse even.

With these activities we’ll compare

  • adjectives (taller than) , Grammar here
  • nouns ( more people than,fewer rooms than, less pollution than)  Grammar here
  • adverbs ( more quickly than) Grammar here
  • superlative of the adjectives. Grammar here

So, without further ado, let’s get down to some serious speaking

♥Activity One: The place where you live

I started this post talking about the weather in Asturias. I am pretty sure my students would share my feeling about so much rain. So, after sort of complaining about so many rainy days, I am going to ask them to compare living in Asturias (north of Spain) with living in Andalucia (south of Spain). I’ll lead this activity with students contributing with their ideas and this will help me correct what I hope will be little mistakes.

Activity 2 Look Around You Competition


Students in groups of three or four compare students in the classroom. Set a time limit of about 5 minutes for students to talk  and on your signal each group of students should write as many comparative and superlative sentences as they can about the people in their classroom. At the end of the time period, have one group share their sentences. If another group has the same sentence as the first group, both groups should cross that statement off their list. Continue until all groups have read all of their statements and any duplicates are eliminated. The group with the most statements remaining wins. I owe this activity to Susan Verner.

Activity 3. Using Pictures to Compare

 

Activity 4. Superlative Superlatives

Get students in pairs or threes and ask them to discus the following questions . Click here to get the pdf