Wednesday 24th April We talked about language and politics today. We started off doing this handout: get it here . Then we had a look at the different articles: The Guardian The Economist The New York Times BBC Finally, in groups students discussed the political debates of last Monday and Tuesday, but form a purely linguistical point of...
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WEDNESDAY 10 th APRIL 1. Talking about art   SCOPE AND SEQUENCE Feedback : a summary of the conversations we had last week about the environment. Download handout . What is art? Students worked on their definitions for "art". Although I wrote them down and thought I had saved them, it turns out that unfortunately I do not have...
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WEDNESDAY 3 rd APRIL 1. Talking about environmental issues   SCOPE AND SEQUENCE  A piece of news: We started off by reading a piece of news in BBC news about Canada's pollution . You can check it out here. Vocabulary : quiz about environment vocabulary. After that we did a quiz. We got a 95% correct answers. What about you? You...
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WEDNESDAY 27 th MARCH (The following plan will be developed in two sessions) 1. Talking about parent-children fights 2. Talking about environmental issues   SCOPE AND SEQUENCE  Vocabulary : “to fight” synonyms: If you want to find synonyms in English, you use a Thesaurus. In this link:  Thesaurus  you can look up the...
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We started off by checking the second part of the listeningexercise  students were supposed to have doneat home. If you didn't, here you have: Access to the PBS documentary Worksheet Answer key Having done that, students expressed their opinions on the documentary, using cleft sentences. What .................. is/was............... What surprised me...
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Yesterday we talked about how some wealthy parents cheated to get their children in the élite universities. We watched an FBI official explaining how the scam worked. Today, we have the reactions of students who are already studying in those universities. Watch the video and read the piece of news on BBC News: US college admissions scandal
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  Today we started off watching a  video on the Washington Post website regarding a scheme in the Us to get wealthy people's kids into the most important universities. It would be an extreme case of helicopter parenting. You can access the piece of news here . We had some debate about who the celebrities involved were. Well, one is Lori Loughlin and the other one is ...
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  We started off the class by showing two commercials where children throw tantrums:   After that, I tried to show a video by PBS. PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service and it is the public television in the USA. It is a nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educational television programming to public television stations in the United...
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On Wednesday we kept on talking about children and parenting. First of all we reviewed our "Ten Commandments" from last week, payint attention to the difference between nouns  (patience) and adjectives (patient). We moved on to check a new handout with everyday vocabulary to talk about parenting. You can get the handout from here . As you can imagine, several words sparked...
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What a great turnout last Wednesday! Thank you all for coming, it was nice to see you again after my absence. We started off by checking old mistakes that were made in the two sessions after Christmas.  Next, students were paired and asked to think about 5 or 6 qualities a good parent needs in order to succeed. Once they had their list, pairs were grouped into foursomes and...
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Firstly, Luismi gave us a sound presentation on why we should, as citizens, obey the law and regulations. Notwithstanding, he mentioned some cases in which we could, in fact, disobey. We then talked about how difficult it is sometimes to have a discussion in English because of some problems that may arise, such as:  - Not finding the right word.  - Others may interrupt ...
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  Well, it seems that the Christmas break left some people exhausted! On the first day of classes after Christmas, we shared our favorite Christmas ads. It was a fun class, because conversations were endless and full of content. Niloo started off talking about the commercial of Campofrío (oops! she didn't want me to say what company it was). Then Sonia talked about a French...
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 In the last class of year 2018 we did two things: 1. We finished our activity about The New Yorker covers: a) First we matched the covers with their real titles  You can see the covers: And here are the real titles: First Anniversary Forward Thinking Boomerang generation Pause Catwalk Moral guidance Entourage Wedding season ...
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Today our class had wo objectives: 1. Do a follow-up activity to help students remember and assimilate the sound verbs 2. Practise giving descriptions and hypothesizing. We started off with a memory game in groups where students had to flip some cards where verb sounds where written. They hd to match the sounds withthe things/animals/people that made those sounds, for example ...
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  Today we devoted the lesson to discover and learn verbs that help us describe situations. English is an incredibly descriptive language, with an undefinable number of words. Watchthis video from Oxford Dictionaries: The verbs we have dealt with today are not, in any way, infrequest or far-fetched. They are every-day usable, they appear in nursery rhymes or children...
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Pronunciation Today we started off by warming up our mouth muscles.  We focused on the long sound /ɔ:/ (horse, law, door, etc); on the ending -ous /əs/ and on the difference between /j/ and /dʒ/ in the following pairs   yet - jet Yale - jail mayor - major you - Jew Mediation and speaking After that, we talked about the article on The Guardian about...
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Last Thursday 22nd a group of bold students went to see Shakespeare's "Much ado about nothing", a comedy. The theatre company is the English Theatre Madrid . They usually do a classic piece around November --they have done three Shakespeare ones in a row: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and this year they went for a comedy. The show was fabulous, with an amazing misè-en-scene and great...
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DESCRIBING PLACES We started off by regrouping students. they were given cards with an adjective that could be used to describe some place. They had to find two other adjectives that meant roughly the same and then sit together with the owners of those cards. The groups formed were: run-down / dilapidated / shabby calm / peaceful / tranquil  stunning /...
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Wednesday 14th November As a follow-up for last week's session, we started off by showing the latest cover of The NewYorker magazine: The set task was to describe the picture first, and then give personal opinion, interpretations, etc. As for descriptions, we need to talk about place: where is everything in the picture? We neeed to describe the people or things that appear in...
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  On the day after the mid term elections, we have been looking at what happened yesterday in the US. First of all we checked what we Knew: Democrats are blue, their symbol is the donkey. Republicans are conservative, their color is red and their symbol is the elephant. They are also known as the GOP (Grand Old Party). Midterms are held in between presidential elections....
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