Back to School 2013, Go!

Read the following story, make sure you understand it and get ready to make a difference at school this year

Make a Difference by rosaperezparapar : originally published by David Deubel in EFL2.0

In the following video, learners from around the world express their feelings in relation to English, would you like to do the same? Write on the board below:

Both the video above and the board below have been published by our colleague Esther Martínez in her great blog, My English Scrapbook. Have a look at it; it is full of interesting activities for English learners

Created with Padlet

Back to School 2013: Steady...

Dear students,

I do hope you are in a good mood to come back to school, expecting something positive, interesting, appealing...

In the last weeks we have seen quite a few examples of the bad use of English  by some important people from Spain, but don´t think you will get away with something like that; we do encourage speaking in our classes and we will do some practice with speeches as well.

Click here to read an analysis of the pronunciation mistakes made by Ana Botella in her real speech.

I want to welcome all of you to both this new school year and my classes in a very enthusiastic way so please, watch this video as if it were meant for you: Nick Selby is a sophomore at  Georgia Institute of Technology and this is the video of his welcome to the freshman class 2013 (click on the captions to read his message because it will probably be a little bit fast for you)

I wish you were all lucky enough to have only great teachers at school; I always do my best to be one but life is hard, you know, and one does not always achieve his/her goals. I´ll do my best, though - I can promise that much... (by the way, what are you willing and able to promise in relation to our classes?)

Infographic taken from Visually.

See you soon!

Back to School 2013: Ready...

We (teachers) have been working hard since the beginning of September: preparing lessons, doing paperwork, getting everything ready for the school year...Sometimes we work on other own but these days meetings are very frequent at school; we spend a lot of time "planning" lessons and activities.

Most of us feel excited about the first days of the school year: what will our students be like? will we be able to get the message through? will they enjoy our classes and learn from them?...

I often wonder what most of my students think of my classes but I do know I will feel like the teacher in this video more than once:

Back to School: First Day 2012

So tomorrow is the bog day: first day with students for the school year 2012-13... Butterflies in the stomach again and probably not only in my stomach but in most of my students´... lots of mixed feelings... So, let´s star with a smile (or two or three...)

The following video is from "The Cosby  Show, " a popular sitcom which ran for eight seasons, from 1984 to 1992. In this episode the Huxtable children (Denise, Theo, Vanessa and Rudy)  face the first day of the new school year while their parents (Cliff and Claire) seem to be looking forward to getting the children finally out of the house. I guess lots of families will be living something like this tomorrow morning.

There are no subtitles in the audio but the situation is familiar to all of you so you shouldn´t have big problems to understand the episode: rely on what you see and what you expect to see. Read the following vocabulary first and make sure you understand it -this will help you follow the story: 

a date 

understated

fortune-teller

prom

chase someone

fix breakfast

get someone dressed

Are you up? To be up

drown

the room where the clothes come to die

first warning

auction

vacation 

bowl 

to beg

lunch box

tuna fish

to look good for the teachers

a senior student

braces

End of the Summer...

It´s been really hard to sit down and start blogging again. After the summer holidays, the first week back at work has been really tiring - not because of the classes since there have been none yet but because of the September resits and the various teachers´meetings.

Next week the classes will officially start and that will be a different story so here I am warming-up: my first post this school year. And let´s make it positive...

First of all, the video of the Black Tie Beach 2012, an event organised by Improv Everywhere. This was their Third Annual celebration. In case you are wondering, the participants were asked to wear old and used clothes, so many of them got them at thrift shops. It was quite a big group of people of all ages and they spent the afternoon laying out, playing games, swimming...Here´s an anecdote of the event: at the end of the video they interview a man who says he is happy and he likes the idea because  they make everybody happy; this is how the organizer of the prank explains their meeting: 

I was delighted to run into the gentleman on the beach. He and I had a really fun encounter in the water at Black Tie Beach 2010, and he wound up being my favorite part of the video that year. He recognized me and came running towards me. He was excited to see us back at Coney Island and said he had seen himself in our YouTube video. He also told me that the photos he took of us that day were very popular on a number of Russian sites he sent them to. I told him that next year he has to participate with us, and he gave me his email address.

And now a commercial that will bring to your mind lots of memories of the summer. The Cultural Landscape of Serra de Tramuntana was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2010 and this video tries to capture the spirit of the area and its lifestyle. The song is called "You can´t Say No Forever" and is performed by Lacrosse, a Swedish  pop band.

Click here to do some activities with the lyrics - excellent listening practice.