Tag Archives: hometown

Lesson Plan: Cities,Towns and Villages

Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Listening, Vocabulary, , , , , , ,

This is a lesson for Intermediate students (B1).

Hopefully, at the end of this lesson you’ll have learnt useful vocabulary to talk about a city/town/ village you like, you’ll be able to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of living in the city or the countryside and you’ll be able to understand people talking about it.

What’s your hometown like?
Are you happy with the city/town/village you live in? What are some of the pros and cons?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of living in the coutryside or in a town

These are some common questions  in oral exams. Before reading any further, think about how you coud best answer these questions. Try really hard. Imagine you’re taking the real test.

Ok! Now!!! Do you have all the words you need or, are there things you couldn’t say because you didn’t have the right words? If this is the case, then go on reading, this post is for you.

Below you’ll find some ideas to help you get started.

Mapa Mental creado con ExamTime por cristina.cabal

 

Now, watch these two short videos and answer the questions below. The first one is about the advantages and disadvantages of living in a big city and the second about the advantages and disadvantages of living in a small town ( could also be applied to living in the countryside)

Video 1. Advantages and disadvantages of living in a big city

Speaker 1. What’s the disadvantage he mentions?

Speaker 2. What are the disadvantages he mentions?

Speaker 3. What is, in his opinion, the main advantage? What two disadvantages does he mention?

Speaker 4. What’s the huge advantage cities have compared to rural areas?

Speaker 5.  What’s, according to this speaker, the main advantage?

Answers here

Video 2. Advantages and disadvantages of living in a small town (could be applied to the countryside)

Speaker 1. What’s the advantage and the disadvantage he mentions?

Speaker 2. What does he say about the pace of life in small towns?

Speaker 3. What’s the advantage and the disadvantage he mentions?

Speaker 4. For him, what’s the advantage and the disadvantage  of living in a small town?

Speaker 5. What does he say happens in small towns?

 Answers here

♥By the way, do you know the difference between a city and a town???

A city is larger than a town and it has a cathedral 🙂 , at least in the UK

Now, do you think you can describe your hometown? Can you talk about your favourite city? Can you talk about the advantages and disadvantages of living in a city or in the countryside? Hope you can!

 

Student’s Corner: My hometown

Students' Corner, , , ,

It’s always a pleasure to share with you the work of my hard-working students.

The task was either talking or writing about their hometown and I have to say that I was gladly surprised when most of my students, who had never ever given a speech in English, decided to give a beautiful speech about their hometown. I had some beautiful contributions in written form (like Rodrigo’s and Carmen’s )  but  most of them were given orally and sometimes even accompanied by slides like the one just below, given by Manuel.
These were the guidelines they had to follow and necessarily include in their presentation.

  • Name of their hometown
  • Population
  • Why it is famous
  • Good places to visit
  • Places to eat and relax
  • The best/worst about their hometwon.

To publish Rodrigo and Carmen’s work I have used Issuu

And Manuel’s beautiful presentation of Avilés shared in Slideshare.

Thank you guys! Well done!

Lesson Plan: Talking about Your Hometown .

American Cultural aspects, freeware, Lesson Plan: Elementary, Speaking, Vocabulary, , , , , ,

This is a lesson for Elementary students.

Step 1. Reading and Listening

Mind mapping is a very important  learning tool for visual learners. This mind map has been created with Exam Time, which is very easy to use and  embeddable, a feature I always appreciate.

There are some steps previous to this mind mapping  we wrote on the board, essentially reading and listening about this issue. Form these listenings and readings we gathered and sorted vocabulary that was, then, written on the board.

Step 2. Mind Mapping

What you see below is a nice way of displaying what was written on the board of the classroom  with the help of my students.

por cristina.cabal
Step 3. Speaking

For this activity, instead of the typical photocopy with the list of questions to talk about, I have put students in groups of three or four and given each group a set of cards, which they had to place face down on the table. Students in turns pick up a card and talk for as much as they can about the given question. At this point I give my students the usual talk about how important it is now, to “show off.”

This is a snapshot of the cards. Click here if you want to print them.

Lesson Plan : Personality adjectives

Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Music, , , , , ,

Step 1. Look at the mosaic below with the faces of some well-known celebrities and, bearing in mind what you know about them, write a description based on their personalities. Make sure you use personality adjectives. Do not mention the name of the celebrity you are describing as your classmates aim will be to find out who you are describing. Please, don’t be too flattering or too hard on people. Remember that “not all that glitters is  gold”.

Important: the description should be written in the way of a comment to this post. How to do it? at the end of the post, click No Comments (or 9 Comments  if hopefully I have already published nine comments), leave the comments in the right field, repeat the required anti-spam word and click Submit Comment.

Step 2. Let’s have some fun. How would you fancy converting text to music? This funny programme allows you to type any words and it sings them back to you. Try typing some personality adjectives and listen to them sung by different people. The site is called Text to sing.

Step 3. Exercises. Do the following online exercises .

Exercise 1 Exercise 2

Step 4: Writing. How do you see yourself and how others see you? This task, as you can imagine, requires mature students as it involves writing and reading about you. First, students  find a classmate they know pretty well. Secondly, students write about their own personality and then, about their friend’s personality. Encourage students to explain and exemplify why they have chosen a certain adjective to describe them and also to describe a negative trait in their personalities as well as in their friend’s. Students pair themselves and compare what they have written.

Step 5. Singing Hand in my pocket by Alanis Morisette