WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Write an email telling a friend about a recent event that went wrong. Choose one of the situations below:

- At a party or special event.

- On holiday

- At work or college.

Length: 150 words

Deadline: January 13^th

LINGRO, MAKING YOU READING EASIER

Dear students,

Here's a great tool to make your reading easier and to improve your vocabulary. Lingro is a great site every student of English should know.

Lingro will help you surf the Internet in English when you are exploring a website full of new words you don't know. It will allow you to quickly look up and learn new vocabulary.

All you need to do is enter the name of the page you want to read on Lingro's homepage, and it will make all the words on the clickable. Then you can click on any word to find out what it means in English or in 11 different languages.

Isn't that cool? Now you have no excuse for not reading in English ;)

READING ASSIGNMENT

FIRST READING ASSIGNMENT

Read a book of your choice and complete the SHEET your teacher will give you with information about it. We will use it for a CLASS DISCUSSION of the books you and your classmates have read on JANUARY 27^th.

The book should be FICTION

and have at least LEVEL A2 (PRE-INTERMEDIATE/LOWER-INTERMEDIATE)

LEARNING IRREGULAR VERBS

Dear students,

Are you already revising English irregular verbs? Do you find it too difficult to remember all of them?

TAKE IT EASY!

There are several ways you can try to learn them, the point is to find one that suits your learning style.  All it takes is a little dedication. Here are some:

- Grouping verbs according to the patterns they follow.

- Making flashcards to test yourself, putting the infinitive on one side and the past simple and past participle forms on the other.

You can also do something more sophisticated like this "foldable verb organiser".

- Downloading an application on your smartphone to listen to their pronunciation or to test yourself.

- Playing a game.  Here’s a nice tool to get some practice while playing: Macmillan Irregular Verbs Wheel 

Maybe it's a good idea to revise them before playing: Macmillan Irregular Verb Wheel 

- Reading or listening to stories. Remember the main events in a story are expressed using past simple. So you will find lots of past forms in most narrations. Here’s an example, you can listen to the story and complete the corresponding exercise.

- Using rhymes or music: Irregular verbs song.

Can you think of any other useful ways of learning the verbs? 

TEXT SPEAK

Still puzzled by text speak? Here's an interesting website to help you decipher your English-speaking friends' messages. It will also help you writing your own text messages in English.

transL8it! is a free, user-friendly translation engine for SMS text message lingo, acronyms and emoticons. With the click of a button, you can take texting lingo and transL8it! to plain English text or visa-versa to SMS lingo!


BFN :)

LYRICS TRAINING

Dear students,

Here’s a link for those of you who missed the last class and would like to listen to the song we played and worked with.

(I'm posting Pink and Nate Ruess's live performance of the song at the 2014 Grammy's Awards too)

Lyrics Training is a fun website where you will be able to improve your English while listening to your favourite music. It will help you improve your ability to understand English through the lyrics of songs. Choose a song, select a game mode (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced or Expert), watch the clip, and fill in the gaps in the lyrics.

Enjoy it!

HALLOWEEN IN THE USA

Dear students,

We talked about British Halloween traditions in the class. Here's a video about how Halloween is celebrated in the USA. The YouTube channel where you will find the video (ESL English Class 101) is also full of useful resources in the form of video lessons so it is worth taking a look too.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

Are you celebrating Halloween this year?

As you know, it is becoming more and more popular in Spain. The night of the 31^st of November has become a special date on the calendar. Lots of Halloween-themed events take place, such as costume parties, especially in big cities.

But it is still not quite as big as its celebration in the USA. Would you like to get an idea of how important it is there? Take a look at the statistics below:

WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Dear students,
I'm posting instructions for the first writing assignment of the year: A web post.

Write a web post about the best time to visit your country for a forum on a travel website.

Reply to the following post:

John Brown: My wife and I would like to go on holiday to Spain next year, to Madrid. When is the best time to go?

Length: 120 words

Deadline: November 11^th

PODCASTS

Are you looking for a new way to improve your understanding of spoken English?

Podcasts are a great and fun way to do so.

What’s  a podcast?

Many of you will already be familiar with them. For those of you who haven’t heard about podcasts before let me explain briefly.

Podcasts are digital audio or video files or recordings, usually part of a themed series, that can be downloaded from a website to a media player or computer. They are available online and once you download them you can listen to them wherever and whenever you want.

You can download them to your computer, your mp-3 player or your phone. After you download them you can listen to a podcast in the gym, when you go for a run, while you’re doing housework, on the bus, train or in your car... so they are very convenient.

With a little dedication, English language podcasts will help you quickly improve your listening skills and proficiency. One perk (benefit) is that podcasts often have transcripts (a written version of the audio). This means that you can listen and read at the same time, or look at a transcript if one part of a podcast confuses you.

Some of them are specially made for students of English as a foreign language so you can find one appropriate to your level and listen to skilled speakers who will teach you useful vocabulary in a fun way. Others are produced for a native audience, so you will be able to listen to authentic English.

If you would like to try listening to one, here’s a link to an example about the topic we’ve been dealing with in the class: The weather. The podcast is called 6 MinuteVocabulary and you will find it on the BBC Radio website. You will find some other podcasts there designed for students of English too. I'll also keep on posting other suggestions during the year.

There are podcasts about any subject under the sun. So find the one you are interested in and enjoy your learning!

PHOTOGRAPH - ED SHEERAN

Dear students,

Did you enjoy the song we listened to in the class today? Would you like to know more about the artist or the song?

I’m a music lover so when I like a song I’m always curious about the meaning of its lyrics and the artist who wrote it. If that is the case with you too, here’s a great site where you can read lots of interesting information about bands and artists as well as learn about the stories behind their songs. It’ll help you understand the songs you listen to.

Click here to find out more about Ed Sheeran and his song Photograph.

I hope you find it interesting and useful!

QUESTIONS

Dear students,
Here's a link to several resources which can help you understand question formation better. 

The site (BBC Learning English) where you will find it is worth a look too. You will find lots of interesting stuff.



I hope it helps!

GRADED READERS E-BOOKS

Hi everyone!

Here’s an interesting website I’ve just found which you will love if you are avid readers but have no more space in your bookshelves for new books.

Here you will find adapted books for students of English classified into different levels. They are available on different formats for different eBook readers.  Some of them can also be downloaded as audiobooks, so you can listen to the story as well as reading it. And the best news is that all of this is for free!

Anyway, if you are more of a ‘traditional book’ person you can also visit to the school library and browse the shelves, you are sure to find something interesting too!

Click here if you are interested and enjoy your reading!

RIVAS ENGLISH SPEAKING FORUM

Dear students,
I've been reading through the information you wrote for me today in the class. I've noticed many of you find it difficult to speak or understand spoken English

Of course, the more you practice, the better you get at it,  so here's an idea to improve your speaking and listening skills. Maybe some of you already know the English Speaking Forum in Rivas or you have already tried it, have you? If so, let us know if it helped you.

WELCOME!!!

Dear students,

Welcome and thank you for taking time to visit my blog!

My name is Mari Luz. I've created this blog to share with you useful resources to improve your learning out of the class.

This year I’ll be teaching Básico 2, so I'll be posting contents related to what we see in the class at that level as well as any other interesting material or info.

So far the sidebar and the blog archive are almost empty. I hope it'll be full of exciting and motivating stuff at the end of the year. Any contributions will be more than welcome.

Hopefully this blog will be a useful resource for you in my English class and beyond. Feel free to browse and explore. Look around and enjoy your visit!

Stay posted! ;)

MLuz

COURSEBOOK 2015-2016

Dear students,

Here is some information on the textbook that we will be using for the upcoming year (2015-16).

VOYAGE

Caroline Krantz and Julie Norton

LEVEL: B1

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Coursebook and Workbook Pack with DVD with KEY

TASTER

Hello everyone!
I've been asking myself this question for a long time...

... and finally I have decided to give it a try.
This is my very first post, just a taster for what I hope will become a new way to help my students out of the class. I hope you will find it interesting and useful.