MARK´S LOVE STORY

http://www.slideshare.net/pdharam/love-story-of-mark Using videos to develop writing skills. This beautiful love story (a bit weird maybe) can be used as a starter for students to turn the whole visual story into words. Students should watch the video first and then write the story down. Enjoy it!

Practise your listening

I recommend the following link:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/index.html
You can find lots of videos to practise your listening skills. They are classified according to level and topic and you even have exercises about the videos to practise online. Highly recommended for beginners, elementary and pre-intemediate students. Surf and enjoy

PRONUNCIATION POEM

Hiya! For those students complaining about English pronunciation there's a very interesting Pronunciation Poem by the British Council at http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-poems-pronunciation-poem.html
I used it with my Basico 1 Students and I can tell you it's good practice and fun if you get them learn it by heart! There's also an activity after listening to it so that they can check their comprehension but remember here we just focus on sounds not meaning since it's such a basic level. You can download the audio, the text and the activity too. Have a nice week!

English pronunciation is not always easy

Hello Elllo! My favourite listening place

We sometimes need fresh resources to use in the classroom when (and our students too) feel really tired of the textbooks, which are not always realistic enough. This is a most interesting webpage called English Listening Lesson Library OnLine (http://www.elllo.org/) which offers a wide range of recordings uploaded by English speakers from all over the world. We can also find ready-to-use materials to be used supplementing the online activities. It is most suitable for active lessons where participants have to be dynamic in order to acquire listening and speaking skills.

BETTER WITH HUMOUR

Remember what the Monty Pythons said: "Always look on the bright side of life" :-) All of us have experienced that what you learn by means of humour is much more difficult to forget, so keep Singing in the Rain and, please, "make them laugh".

USING VIDEOS ON THE NET

The use of videos can prove very useful to improve your listening skills. You can find plenty of places on the net to get to use them. A very useful one is YAPPR, where you will find all kinds of short videos with transcriptions that can be shown or not at your will, both in English and Spanish. It is a free place.
They send you all new entries regularly to your email where you can browse through and find useful items for your students.
Here is the link of the last delivery we have got: http://es.yappr.com/welcome/Welcome.action
Hope you really enjoy and take advantage of it.
Cheerio!

THE TOP ONES

The category of "5-star activity" is the one to be used when you want to share your "tricks" with your colleagues, all those things you know are good for classroom management, for warming up, for reviewing...

Be generous, be a 5-star teacher ;-)

LET´S PLAY THE MUSIC!!!

The web is full of music, take advantage of YouTube and all those sites with lyrics and invite your students to sing; you know they will improve their pronuntiation and their listening and, of course, will enjoy themselves.

You can suggest links or design any activity related to songs, included, of course, under the category of "oral activities". But you can also add others, such as "English speaking cultures" to talk about traditions and folklore. Take a look at this blog prepared for Saint Patrick holiday, it may give you some hints about how to use songs to talk about culture. But, obviously, all of you have used songs at class, we aren´t teaching you anything you don´t already know, so please, share your ideas with other people, and just as Sinatra sang, Let's play the music and dance!!!

ENGLISH AROUND YOU

Under the category of "events" any cultural activity in English can be suggested so that students can check how close (even more than they may think) Englsih is.

A movie, a play, a lecture... there are so many events in English in Madrid everyday!!! Besides, there are also many pubs in which English speaking people meet, and they could be a useful (and enjoyable, for sure!) place to go after a long and tiring day at school to relax, have some fun, chat or listen to "real people" speaking in real English.

Any suggestion will be very welcome!

ARE THEY THAT DIFFERENT?

"English speaking countries" is the category to use if a student wants to find information about traditions, national holidays, history, literature, music, art, sport, famous people... anything related to culture in English speaking countries.

You can use a holiday calendar to teach, or to learn, something new about their culture, or suggest a link you may consider interesting to share your knowledge of English speaking countries. There are so many on the web... why don´t you surf it and propose some?

USE YOUR ENGLISH TO...

Under the category of "use of English" teachers can advise thier students about useful vocabulary of structures to use English in a special context.

"At the airport", "in a restaurant", "in the classroom", "planning a party", "suggesting places to go on holidays"... any of these proposals could be the title of a "use of English" entry.

WORD CHALLENGE

Under the category of "vocabulary" teachers can add any kind of suggestion, exercise, etc considered interesting for their students.

For example, there is a very easy (and famous) game all of you can play to build up your vocabulary. Besides, if you are on FACEBOOK there is an application called WORD CHALLENGE which is very similar. This game consists of finding as many words as possible using the letters contained in a word, for instance, if the word is TABLES you can find words such as tab, able, ale, ales, sale, best, seat, tea... Rules can be added to make it more interesting, such as giving more points for words longer than 4 letters, or extra points if students don´t use "s" to write the plural of a word already said. Why don´t you try it? Enjoy yourselves! :-)