Homework: exercises on quantifiers. Compositons about reviews were given back marked.
Speaking and reading: An article about global warming.Specific vocabulary: greenhouse effect, pollutions, fossil fuels, floods.... Slides to develop the topic speaking. Photo description.
Writing: an opinion composition. We didn´t have time to finish it ,so next Wednesday we´ll carry on.
Homework: Get a speaking about climate change ready.
BASIC LEVEL A/B
Homework: A composition titled "Description of a friend" and the last exercises of the set about can/can´t.
Speaking: Possession :Whose? e.g. whose pencil is it? it´s Carlos´s , whose keys are they? they´re Alba´s. Oral practice with objects in the class.
Grammar: Possessive Pronouns: St.b.p. 128. rules and exercises Possessive adjectives and pronouns. Essential Grammar in Use chapters 60, 61.
Song: Possession. St.b.p. 47
Grammar: Simple past: rules and exercises.Audio . We started dealing with the simple past of the verb to be. A handout with activites. "Now they´re famous singer and actors, but what were they before?. complete with a job. Listen and trepeat.
Phonetics: was7were, p.44 of the handout.e.g were they famous?,yes, they were/no, they weren´t.
Vocabulary: Prepositions: at,in, on for places.,p, 45 of the handout. eg. at home, in a meeting, on a bus.
Listening: p.45 (handout) Were was Mike yesterday?. Listen and complete the sentences.
Homework: Review unit 4 . Finish unit 60 (possessive adjectives), The other set of exercises (unit 4 with can/can´t, verb -ing) page 155 section 4D about possessive pronouns, and workbook, section 4D
NB2 Homework: Exercises about infinitives and gerunds. Speaking: For those students who hadn´t done their descriptions on Monday . Grammar: St.B.p.56. "How much can you learn in a month?" Match notices to meanings. Rules of Have to and Must. Grammar Bank.St.B.p. 134 with the rules and a couple of exercises. Grammar, unit 33 dealing mostly with Have to. Reading: St.B.p.56,57. "How much can you learn in a month?" About a journalist who had to learn a foreign language in a month. Some questions to answer. Listening: St.B.p.57. Based on the previous activity. A true-false listening played three times. Grammar: Have to and Must with exercises for homework. Vocabulary: St.B.p. 57. Modifiers such as quite, really, very, incredibly... Vocabulary: St.B.p. 58. Expresions to do withj sports: play, go, do. Speaking: About sports. Speaking: Interaction: to complain in a hotel. Homework: Get the interaction ready for Thursday, the exercises on modals. NI2 Homework:Grammar, units 92,93,94 about defining relative clauses Grammar: Units 95,96 about non defining relative clauses. We saw the rules and examples Listening: a mock exam for June tests Writing: Writing letters: an application letter. We saw a couple of models: the ideas, laylout and basic rules to write a formal letter of this kind. Homework: Grammar, units 95,96 and some more exercises on relative clauses
SPEAKINGS This is the speaking guide you should know by heart. Wednesday, 16,December,2009. In this post you have plenty to practice you speaking skills
GRAMMAR Grammar ,units: - 64 : A an. - 65: Flower(s), buse(s) . Singular and plural - 66: A car/some money 1 (countable and uncountable) - 67: A car/some money 2 (countable and uncountable)
I´m sitting in front of the computer,nearly frozen,feeling blue and miserable with this awful weather and daydreaming about where I´d like to be right now. Just look below. Do you know who I am? I bet you don´t.
Focussing on more serious matters ,I´ve found some web pages for you to browse. They are both useful and entertaining. - www.tolearnenglish.com/cqui2/myexam/index.php There are three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Have a look at these sections: - Lessons and exercises - Leisure time - Links - www.songsforteaching.com. about songs Go to: - Languages - English - www.agendaweb.org Work the following sections: - Grammar - Vocabulary - Verbs - Listening As you´ll probably get bored these Christmas holidays , you´ve got plenty of activities to do in English.
Here you have two different types of speaking activities: - interaction 1, interaction 2 - speech 1, speech 2 . It will be a 3 minute speech. It´s the kind of speaking activities you may come across in the exam, so practise them a lot. There are many and varied situations that can happen in your daily life and as you can see many activities are about asking questions. PAZ GARCIA ORVIZ has sent us this song. Thnk you Paz, I really enjoy your help.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970),
To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides. David Viscott,
All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon sand. Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
There is no remedy for love but to love more. Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862),
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999)
We can only learn to love by loving. Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999),
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. Jeanne Moreau
The first duty of love is to listen. Paul Tillich (1886 - 196
NB2 WARNING: You were very talkative on Monday in spite of my warnings. Please , remember you´re here to learn English and since this is not a bar or a café ,you have certain duties and one of these is that you have to remain silent when the teacher is speaking. I wouldn´t like to take serious action , so take notice of this. - Homework: Grammar, unit 14, wk: p.15 - Reading: A photocophy titled "It was a cold, dark, night".A predicting story using the simple past and the past continuous. - Listening and reading: As you had problrms with the last listening we had done on Thursday , we did it again. St.B.p. 19 . "The lovers of La Bastille". First, we read the introduction and then the listening activity. - Vocabulary: St.B.p. 19. Prepositions in, at ,on. for place and time. Vocabulary Bank, St.B.p. 148. Here we saw the prepositions in detail. - Speaking : I gave you a really important photocopy with the instructions to describe photos. It´s essential for you to learn how to describe a picture and you have all the steps in that paper. We saw it in detail. - Homework: A drawing for you to describe (you can star on Tuesday and the deadline is Thursday, this means everybody have to do it that day) ,grammar , unit 106.
NI2 - Grammar: Grammar, units 38,39,40 about conditionals and the structures "Iwish; if only". We just did the activities I was most interested in , the remaining exercises were left for homework. This activity took us longer than I expected because of the writing and speaking practice. More conditional exercises and their answers. - Listening: St.B. p. 25. People talking about alternative medicine with a matching exercise and a note taking and summarising one. As they spoke quite fast , in the end we listened to it with the script on p.124 at sight. - Homework: Reading.St.B.p. 22 and finish the exercises on conditionals.
Biologists think pufferfish, also known as blowfish, developed their famous “inflatability” because their slow, somewhat clumsy swimming style makes them vulnerable to predators. In lieu of escape, pufferfish use their highly elastic stomachs and the ability to quickly ingest huge amounts of water (and even air when necessary) to turn themselves into a virtually inedible ball several times their normal size. Some species also have spines on their skin to make them even less palatable.
A predator that manages to snag a puffer before it inflates won’t feel lucky for long. Almost all pufferfish contain tetrodotoxin, a substance that makes them foul tasting and often lethal to fish. To humans, tetrodotoxin is deadly, up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide. There is enough toxin in one pufferfish to kill 30 adult humans, and there is no known antidote.
From: National Geographic
NB2 - Homework : I collected the compositions you had for homerwork. Let me remind you that if that particular day ,you can´t come to class, just send it to me through the "contact" section in my blog. - Grammar:St.B.p. 17 simple past tense . Grammar Bank p. 128 with the rules and exercises and p. 155 with the list of irregular verbs. We read them out and checked their meanings. Then I gave you some photocopies about SIMPLE PAST and we did many of the exercises. - Phonetics: The correct pronunciation of the simple past can only be reached by listening to songs or watching TV. We saw some basic rules on St.B.p. 17 and practised the most common regular verbs. - Listening: St.B.p. 17 "A holiday where everything went wrong". you had to correct the wrong statements . Remember that you have the CDs ,so you can listen to these class activities whenever you fancy. - Homework: Grammar, unit 10 "was/were". Workbook.p. 13,14 and do the remaining exercises of the photocopies about the simple past.
NI2 - Homework: Phrasal verb exercises . - Grammar: St.B. p. 146: adverbs which are often confused, e.g. specially -especially. late-lately. St.B.p. 15 .Writing: Joke where you had to insert adverbs to make it more vivid and interesting. Grammar, units 99,100 about adverbs. We saw the rules and the activities were left for homework. - WritingSt.b. p. 156. How to make a composition more lively by using adverbs and intensifiers . - Reading: ST.B.p. 16 with true-false statements and a vocabulary exercise. - Listening: Meeting people using different registers , and a listening of a speech given by the director of Studies to students starting a summer course. Remember that you all have the CDs to listen to these activities . - Reading: St.B.p. 17 Understanding signs and some very common daily life expressions you must learn so as not to seem rude. - Homework: Revise and check. St.B.p 19. Grammar, unit 99,100.
Alum Lewis was a Welsh poet and soldier who dies in WW2. I´ve come accross with one of his books and it´s a real wonder. Listen to the poem "All Day it has Rained" read by Dylan Thomas. You´ll see the poem below.
All Day it has Rained
All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors, Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground And from the first grey wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap, All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream, Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces. And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces, Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks, Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home;
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome, And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees; -Yet thought softly, morosely of them, and as indifferently As of ourselves or those whom we For years have loved, and will again Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.
And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.
For more details about his biography click HERE. Check 17/10/2009 post.
NB2A/C - Homework : Grammar, units 5,6,7. - Grammar: a review on frequency adverbs, grammar,unit 94 - Vocabulary: a review on physical and personality adjectives. St. B. pg 145. - Speaking: your ideal partner. With the adjectives seen before you had to make a short speech about what your ideal partner should be like. - Speaking: a pair work activity to match different people with their IDEAL PARTNERS. - Homework: Grammar, unit 94 (frequency adverbs) and workbook pg, 6,7.
NI2 - Homework: Grammar, units 3,4,5. Simple present-present continuous and simple past. I collected the compositions about "National Stereotypes" - Listening : Abba. St.B. p.9. Listen for details. Take notes and discuss them . Listen and read with the script at sight. _ Phonetics: Intonation in questions. - Vocabulary: The media. St.B. p145. Words related to the press and a filling the blanks exercise. - Grammar: St.B. p11.Question formation. correct the mistakes in questions. Grammar Bank p130 with the rules and p. 131 with a couple of exercises. Grammar, unit 49. Questions (the first unit) - Speaking: a handout withQUESTIONS to interview your partner. Remember you have to make a serious effort to keep a conversation or a speech going. If you run out of words or ideas make them up. - Homework: Grammar, unit 49 about questions , workbook 1A: the reading
Anemones areinvertebrates, as are 95% of the earth's creatures. Most invertebrates are insects. The phylum Cnidaria includes anemones, corals, jellyfish, and hydras. The 'cnidae' are the stinging cells which provide the animals a means of capturing prey and/or defending themselves with a painful sting. There is only one opening into this cavity, the mouth, through which everything passes in and out. The mouth is surrounded by several or many tentacles which contain the nematocysts (cnidae) at their tips. Sea anemones, being members of the Class Anthozoa, along with hard and soft corals are attached to rocks or the sea floor
Most anemones survive in a symbiotic relation with with a marine algae called. zooxanthellae The zooxanthellae are organisms whose waste products are used by the anemone for food. Since the zooxanthellae require light to carry on photosynthesis, anemones in turn require bright light to thrive in thesea. The zooxanthellae are generally a light brown color, the same color as the light brown leather corals that also harbor zooxanthellae. The loss of zooxanthellae, apparent by a whitening of the anemone, usually means the anemone will slowly grow smaller and smaller until it dies.
From: www.animal-world.com
NB2 A/C We starte with a handout about the most common words, verbs and expressions used in the classroom, so from now on you should make good practise of them instead of speaking "Spanglish".Click on EXERCISE to see them. We went on with the alphabet and several exercises , finally a listening with spelling names. NI2E We had a review on the common expressions used in the classroom , just to make sure you address to each other in English with these basic functions. Click on EXERCISE to see them. - Student´s Book (st bk) pg 4 "What´s in a name?" a quiz about vocabulary , spelling and pronunciation of names. - Listening. four people taking about their names . - Homework: a speaking activity on pag6 titled "What´s in a name?" Please, make a serious effort and do your best because speaking is a matter of daily practice.
