Brainstorming

I’ve spent this afternoon trying to keep cool in this intense dry heat we have today in our city and also brainstorm some ideas for a conversation class about advertising for the weekend. The CCAA conversation class book already has a basic class for this subject, but like last weekend I want to increase the amount of activities to make the class last more than an hour. I have been toying with the idea of spreading this class over two weekend, one for advertising itself and the other for deconstructing adverts. The students are mainly high intermediate to MEC but I don’t want the second class to get too complicated and hard for the students to do. I receive English Teaching Forum every three months and they had an article about this and I’ll try to simplify this to use in class. The CCAA book starts off with a basic cartoon but I’ll look for some adverts online that I can download and record to pass throughout the class on the dvd player. Also I’m trying to think of a different way to ewnd the class, last weekend it was a ranking game that worked out rather well. This time I was thinking of having some envelopes containing some questions related to advertising fixed to the whiteboard in some numbered boxes that the students would choose from these to ask the other groups/students. This having the students choose from numbered areas of the board increases the student’s participation and they get a kick out of trying to guess an easy question hahahaha!! I might try to video this is possible and probably post it somewhere where only the students can see it. I’ll ask them about places for this as most of the students love posting their own photos or video online and I’m sure they’ll have some suggestions I also saw a nice lesson plan for a conversation class about making an advert by using an advert. I think this is going to be too much to do in one try, maybe I’ll spread this out and do over the rest of the semester so that the students don’t get bored doing the same thing over and over again.

This month it seems that two of my student in MEC1 have birthdays and one group asked me if they could spend some time near the end of their class to have a little birthday party. This little amount of time they asked for will not be as little as I would want hahahaha!! They are already bringing food and Roberta is going to make some hot dogs for their party. Good thing we live right near the school. I’ll try to get some photos and maybe a video of them singing ‘Happy birthday’ too. I’m saving space in my tummy by not eating anything so I can try all the goodies they are going to bring

The Martians have landed

This afternoon I tried out an activity we haven’t tried before in my MEC/Advanced group. I saw the idea in a book by Penny Ur and thought my teens would like it a lot. Roberta helped me to prep a little for it too   The activity came from ‘Discussions that work’ and was called ‘Men from Mars.’ The basic idea was that the students would put themselves in the places of Martians who were coming into contact with relics for the first time from the planet Earth and trying to figure out the purpose of the objects without any reference to human civilization. I used just everyday objects for the relics and to make the activity a bit more fun and to get the students in the right frame of minds to think as aliens Roberta printed out some different colored eyes and with some help from some double-sided tape I glued them to my students foreheads to give them all an extra eye hahahaha!! This idea went down really well, so well they got photographed with their new addition The first part of the activity was that the students had to find out as much as they could from the objects only from its presence, touching them and seeing what moved, sounds, etc and writing this down. I asked them to give me their first report (I was in the role of head Martian) and after they had reported what they had discovered physically about the objects I asked them to then think of functions for each of the objects. I had to let them have a bit of creative freedom with this, which they really seemed to enjoy. After they had debated a few good ideas for the functions of the objects they gave their final report to me. We had a lot of fun with this activity, the students really got into it

Pic 1 – Myself with my student with our extra eyes

Pic 2 – The artifacts that my students worked with

New students

This last week I acquired more students, private classes. I like these students as i get to do something different from the usual classroom stuff. Generally I give conversation classes and this changes depending on what the student wants. Sometimes we just sit around and chat about anything just to practice normal conversations. Its all good for me as I love speaking in my own language

I’ve been creating worksheets with Roberta and we now like to upload a copy straight to Eslprintables so it gets shared with other teachers. After thirty copies of your worksheets have been downloaded you become a premium user which allows you to download thirty of the newest printouts without using any of your point per day   This is excellent but its important to still remember to keep uploading worksheets so as to make sure they all get shared around. I love these kinds of websites, anything Web 2.0 is great as far as I’m concerned. I like trying out new stuff as it comes online – unfortunately I don’t have the time to use everything I would like to with my students   I think my favorite ones are Wikispaces and Quizlet which I use a lot at the moment. I like hot Potatoes as well, all of the exercises I’ve created were made with this program. Everyday I read about something new in sites like Classroom20, If only I had the time to use everything hehehe!!

Conversation class

I work at two English schools and one of my students has class only on his own with either myself or Roberta. He learned English more or less by himself and mainly our classes consist of conversation classes, one with me and one with my wife. Today he asked if he could give me some texts and if I could record them onto a cd so that he could listen to my voice as he reads along with the text. I like this idea a lot, I’d already toyed with the idea and after the Easter hols I’ll get him to print the texts for me. I already have the program to record the mp3s so I can convert them to an audio cd with Nero. I’m going to use Audacity for this, it’s free and very easy to use. I had a few problems finding how to record in Odeo but a friend of ours uses it a lot and gave me a few pointers. I’ll try both online and with the audio cd too, just because I’d like to try the Web 2.0 side of it as well I have a book of texts and short stories that I’ll record and upload and then use a WordPress site to host them for my students to use. I think it’ll be a lot of fun experimenting with this Although I’m British I speak both British and American English with an accent that seems to float somewhere between the two of them, my students tell me that its easier to understand me sometimes than the Models hahaha!! I’m not sure what my voice sounds like recorded, this should be good for a laugh