Our English school has an auditorium complete with projector and I wanted to do something with my groups using this. Getting into this place isn’t always easy as there are many groups all wanting to get in there hahahaha!! I decided to play a ‘what happens next game’ with some of my groups and spent the last couple of day finding a decent sized video clip that I could divide and use with my students in order to play the game. My biggest problem was finding a show that the students don’t all regularly watch so that they wouldn’t know straight away what happened in the clip. Luckily Sky TV is full of shows and finding one wasn’t all that difficult. I chose a clip from ‘Glee’. I used MS Movie Maker to edit the clip into three pieces and because the projector here will only accept avi files, I had to use Winavi to convert the files from wma to pass them auditorium. I was going to divide the clip only into two parts but as luck would have it the story let me divide into three parts,so I could ask the students to first predict what would happen and then for them to predict the cliffhanger for homework. I have to mark two classes in a row a little time at the end of each class in the auditorium just to do the activity but my classroom is right next to it so moving rooms quickly isn’t going to be a problem for me and my groups. 
The nice thing is that the projector uses usb and this saves me a lot of time and hassle as I can just drag the files on and off the hard disk and use them without having to burn them to a DVD first. The nice thing is that as well as using it with my Wizard groups, I can also use it with my conversation class students straight off our computer screen because of the large size monitor
As well as trying to get a few of these kinds of exercises prepared in advance for my students, I’m also going to take over planning the extra activities for the kids and teen students. With the kids, I get to take them to the ice cream parlor, watch movies and play games with them based around the movies, take them to the local cinema, etc. Of course, for these activities out of the school I’ll draft in some of the other guys to help me out For the older groups, it seems to be mainly activities based around movies, although I’ll see if I can get them interested in doing some other stuff too. I have many activities to fall back on from nine years of teaching as well as a set of bookshelves overloaded with books and material. Roberta is always good for coming up with new stuff to try out as well I’ll see what comes of this and post the activities I do here
We love watching movies, it’s a shame that there isn’t a cinema near to our city. There was one but it was closed quite a while back from lack of customers. All the movies were really old too, they appeared only months after everywhere else. Movies usually shown here are big blockbusters and for small cinemas like the one that existed here probably don’t have the money to get them as soon as they are released. I watched Hulk2 the other night, it’s not too bad. I don’t really see why people were whining about it. The story is about a guy who turns green and has superhuman strength when he gets angry, what do they expect from the film? hahahaha!! I watched Pathology last night, an excellent movie and not so grusome as say the Saw movies. We liked it a lot. My next movies I really want to see is The dark knight, I’ll have to go to Brasilia to see it though, not sure when that will be.
