SUNSET

We started with two controversial speeches ,one about torture and the other about the sell of human organs , with their points clearly stated and logically organised, with some mistakes though. Anyway, I liked them because of the effort and time the activity must have taken. You didn´t play it by ear.
Dealing with Reported Speech was not a tough matter since it was done by means of a light warm up oral activity , to remind you of the basic principles. We carried on with some activities in your books: page 70 Close Up where you had to put the lines of the summary of Bill Bryson´s story in the correct order. The verbs in bold are reporting verbs , the best occasion to make out the differences between Say and Tell and other verbs that follow these patterns such as inform, convince persuade someone to do or explain, declare,claim to someone. There is a Language Reference box on page 72. In your grammars there is also a chapter about this issue on pages 102 and 103.
We did the listening exercise about having a holiday romance. Very shy ,in fact not much was said, though I suspect you know a lot more than you pretend.Activities 1,2 and 3 with questions ,fill in ,and matching.I told you what vocabulary you should skip in your glossary: Where´s My Car? and Every Postcard Tell us a Story.
For next Monday ,please finish Unit 7 exercises in your workbooks and also do those in your grammar on pages 102,104 and 105. Let me remind you about the speeches.

There are no words to describe such breathtaking,sublime sunset . Underwater life in darkness is a totally bubbling and intense sort of life ,even more amazing than at daytime.

On Wednesday we´ll have a game of Scrabble .The students who take in it, please , come to classroom B-14 .I´ll be forever grateful with your contribution to extra curricular activities.

THERE´S NO CLASS ON THURSDAY

DESERT

A couple of students made their speeches in group A , group C will do it next Wednesday. I also collected the compositions about advantages and disadvantages .As the class was held in the lab ,we started with a song The Gambler, by Kenny Rogers, an American country singer, whose lyrics are easy to understand . Then a video about holidays which turn out to be a failure: A Holiday in Hell. We finally dealt with some specific vocabulary about holidays which had already seen in the video: types of holiday, where to stay and adjectives to describe that place. Please, never say again wonderful, beautiful or nice.
For homework ,please, do the vocabulary exercises
With such a desert who would dream of tropical ,colorful fish and plentiful underwater life? Red Sea is a direct translation of the Greek Erythra Thalassa and in Latin Mare Rubrum.
The name of the sea may have to do the seasonal groth of a red-coloured cyanobacteria near the water surface. Some think that it refers to the mineral-red mountains nearby .
The Red Sea lies in arid land, desert . The reasons for the good development of reefs is because of its greater depths and a practical water circulation system , The water mass exchanges its water with the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Aden. These factors limit the effect of high salinity caused by evaporation and cold water in the north and hot water in the south.
The surface water temperature of the Red Sea during the summer is about 26 °c in the north and 30 °C in the south, with only about 2 °C variation during the winter . The rainfall over the Red Sea and its coasts is extremely low.

MORE CORAL REEFS

I was more than pleased with the speeches I heard mainly because of the effort made , ideas stated and the way you backed up your points of view and reasoned the questions that arose. Then we started to deal with some specific vocabulary related to travelling. It is obviously more to study, so I removed quite a good number of items from the glossary: those related to the workbook (not the listening exercise) and those of the exercise called Where´s my Car?. As we carry on with the unit, we´ll go through the glossary again. A listening activity in your workbooks ,page 43, about a trip that went wrong .You had to order the sequence of events, note down time expressions and spot differences. With the first group we had time for a speaking activity, anecdote, in your book ,page 70, A Holiday you Went on when you were a child.Group C will do it later next week.

For homework, please, start doing unit 7 exercises in your workbook.

Coral reefs are structures produced by living organisms, found in shallow, tropical marine waters In most reefs, the predominant organisms are stony corals, colonial cnidarians that secrete an exoskeleton of limestone. The accumulation of this material, broken and piled up by waves, produces a huge calcareous formation that supports the living corals and a great variety of other animal and plants. corals are found both in temperate and tropical waters.

Waves, coral eating fish such as parrot fish,sea urchins, and other organisms break down the coral skeletons into fragments that settle in the reef . Algae (i.e zooxanthelate) are important contributors to the structure of the reef . These algae contribute to reef-building by depositing limestone over the surface of the reef and contributing also to the structure of the reef.

Corals have symbiotic relationships with algae called zooxantellae; these algae placed in the coral polyps carry out photosynthesis and produce organic nutrients that are then used by the coral polyps. Because of this relationship, coral reefs grow much faster in clear water with more sunlight.

ON THURSDAY 28TH OF FEBRUARY I´M AFRAID I WON´T BE GOING TO WORK.

Students chose a topic to give a speech throughout the week and I noted it down to avoid repetitions with their compositions. Those of you who still haven´t picked up one, please do it on Wednesday after the class.
We finished with the handout you had for homework about tenses and started Unit 8 titled Escape. A nice topic about holidays, good and bad experiences, travel agencies, writing from abroad, falling in love ...
There was a reading called A Day at the Seaside by Brill Bryson, a thoroughly enjoyable writer I recommed because of his irony and sense of humour.A book titled Notes from a Small Island is one of the funniest I´ve ever read because he depicts with a deep and critical insight the Brits and their ways.As I was saying, we went through the activity with the glossary and summarized orally the writer´s ideas in the passage.The comprehension questions on page 68 and the vocabulary exercise on page 70 were done. The last activity was a listening about a couple in their first day in Sydney, Australia with their rows and negotiatiations to spend the day.
For Wednesday two students will start giving their speeches on topics nobody can remain unconcerned. A debate must follow each speech, so get ready to state your point either for or against.
The picture above is one of a magnificent coral reef. If you take a detailed look , you´ll see the water is darker in the background and this is due to the fact that the walls fall down to an extraordinay depth.It´s my ideal holiday indeed.

FOR AND AGAINST

We started with a speaking and listening activities about airports, what people do when there are delays and oral and written exercises about present tenses ( a sort of warm up of unit 8).Along with the listening , the first half of the handout for homework was reviewed. Please, do the second half for next Monday .
Apart from letters of complaint, this term you´re also going to learn to write compositions about advantages and disadvantages. Following the instructions in your books pages 60 and 61 ,we had a look at the most conventional topics eg,e-mail versus "snail mail", then saw step by step the procedures to gather ideas ,develop and logically organize them into paragraphs with and introduction, points in favour, ideas against and a conclusion.As linking words are very closely connected with this activity , we did some practice with a handout summarizing ideas of addition, contrast, giving example,sequencing ideas, results,reasons, contrasts... And to finish,we studied a basic model of a composition of this type with linkers, organization of ideas and general layout. I´m interested in your working this item both in written form and in oral debates.To do so, you were given a list of controversial topics : one for the composition to be handed next Thursday and on Monday you´ll pick up another one for a speech and further debates in class:everybody has to do it.No escape.

FAMILY PICTURE

There weren´t many students in my first class ,but with had a good time as we did activities to unwind a bit. Nevertheless, let me tell you that you are still reluctant to speak whenever I ask you to do with your classmates oral activities.

The grammar exercises 4,5 and 6 on page 9 were reviewed. We went on to do an exercise by writing questions in the present perfect continuous,eg :Who has been wearing my sweater?. Keeping only the word in bold and changing the others.After that , an oral game with cards to guess what the student with the card has been doing. A listening on the same subject , book page 67 Thumb Trouble where students had to answer questions and fill with the correct tense.

Finally on page 63, an activity called Four in a Row to do in groups of three. Students had to say a sentences with a verb/adjective and the right preposition. It was fun.

For homework ,a handout with the tenses dealt with in the class.

This is a family picture of the people I went diving with last summer.Do you know who I am?. Yes, the fourth on the left. Yo keep my balance I´m grabbing a rock because there are sometimes strong currents that can carry you out.

GORGONIAN

Group A had a vocabulary test ,which didn´t take long; group C will do it on Wednesday at 19,30 ,classroom B-10. So, those of group A who still haven´t made it, can come on Wednesday.

We started to see the differences between the Present Perfect Simple and continuous. The rules were inferred through some cartoons you had to match the statements with the cartoons and the rules . A listening activity about Lara Croft in your books page 56 with the same tenses and some exercises on page 57. Finally we saw the rules and uses in your grammars page 7 .

Homework : Grammar page 9, exercises 4,5 and 6. Workbook page 33, exercises 5, 6 and 7

This gorgonian or seafan is an extraordinary creature.It looks very much like a plant, but it isn´t. It belongs to colonial cnidarian. They can be brightly coloured :red, yellow and purple .They live in colonies with polyps with eight tentacles each to catch plankton and food supply.Being fan- shaped , that is wide and flat ,they can get oriented to currents to take most of the nutrients they need. In shallow waters currents are stronger and gorgonian tend to be more flexible whereas in deeper, calmer water they are stiffer and thinner. Gorgonian have a beauty of their own.Great.

CLEANER SHRIMP

I´m awfully sorry for not having made last entry: too much work and very little time. So, I´m going back to Wednesday class.The vocabulary exercises of the glossary were checked focussing on the word building activities.You already had a handout with specific vocabulary related to the Internet and mobile phones and we did the exercises and two listening activities about people calling and not being able to catch what the other is saying because he´s breaking up .I find this handout very interesteing because it deals with new concepts , vocabulary and ideas , all of of them related to everyday life.

Homework : Book page 61, activity number 1 "for" and "against" topics for debates , for instance "Shopping on line versus going out shopping".

On Thursday we went to the lab to do activities on line . I picked up some listening activities fron the BBC ,which took me ages to spot ,but unfortunately the sound took its time to come out , and as a result,my nerves were shattered,more than usual.

For Monday a test on units 5 and 6.

The cleaner shrimp of the picture is an amazing symbiosis of organisms.It is usually associated with moraines ,living happily together, the moraine opens its huge mouth plenty of sharp teeth and lets the shrimp clean it and remove all the parasites that will feed the latter. It´s a relationship where both parts benefit.In many coral reefs ,cleaner shrimp gather at cleaning stations.

LIONFISH

After checking your homework in workbook page 32 numbers 4,5, and 6 , I collected the last formal letters of complaint, then there was a listening activity that I also took for marking. I need some objective references to assess your progress in the different abilities of the language , in doing so you´ll know with time in advance what skills you have to improve.
A speaking activity about the relationship of children with technology and their parents´attitude.Book page 59, reading number 1.This is more important than the reading itself, so we devoted quite a lot of time to talking about this issue.
A handout with vocabulary related to mobile phones and computers .VERY IMPORTANT , the same as the vocabulary in your workbook and book that have to do with technology.Although you may find it boring now, it might be extremely useful in the future when it comes to working for an English speaking company.
For homework : glossary unit 6.
The lionfish is also known as Dragon Fish. The lionfish are voracious predators. When they are hunting, they corner their prey using their large fins and then use their quick reflexes to swallow the prey . They are remarkable for their extremely long and separated spines, and have a striped appearance, red, brown, orange, yellow, black, or white.The venom of the spines is extremely painful, If a spine punctures you, you will experience severe pain and headaches and vomiting. As I usually say: just look and enjoy their beauty ,but never touch anything.