Sunday, March 31, 2013

Travelling UK

The UK's Most Popular Attractions from Cheap.co.uk is a good thing to get the information about the most popular attractions in the UK. The interactive map, with a very nice design, gives a quick link to the name, the picture, the number of visitors per year, and the official site of the attraction. The resource is very convenient to use in class, and suitable to advise students to use it at home.

Monday, March 25, 2013

How 10 Famous Landmarks Get Clean from mental_floss


How 10 Famous Landmarks Get Clean from mental_floss is a very interesting thing with pictures and video about the ten famous landmarks getting cleaned. The resource is quite suitable to use in class to speak about a number of topics - jobs (interesting, unusual, dangerous), places of interest (their everyday life). It can be a good reading exercise (intermediate students), especially practising numbers.

Besides, the story can be a good example to speak about the place where the students live - a nice start for a project "How My City Famous Landmark Get Clean", "The job I find very interesting (unusual, dangerous, useful...):
- the students read and discuss the given article;
- choose the attraction they want to speak about;
- search for the information about it/think over what they can say about it 
- present their work (in the form required).

technology rocks. seriously.: Fabulous and FREE Apps Daily Email

technology rocks. seriously.: Fabulous and FREE Apps Daily Email: Apps are becoming an integral part of everyday education both in school and at home. Having the access to the world of numerous educational Apps is great. The site (one of the greatest in technology for education) has posted the link to Free Apps Daily Email which is of course absolutely useful.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Visual Recipes

Visual.ly presents a collection of 20 visual recipes: pancakes, carrot soup, cupcakes, and others. The idea is really nice. The teacher can use the infographics to help students speak about cooking and eating. The infographics are different in style, vocabulary. The teacher chooses the one he needs for his class.

If The World Were 100 People

If the World Were 100 People - an interesting infographic from Visual.ly - global statistics if the population of the world was 100 people. The infographic may be a good way to practise Conditionals - to introduce the material, or to check how the students can use it in speech (for example, giving the infomation from this infographic).

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Spell Check

A very interesting spelling quiz Spell Check from The New York Times (with answers:)) - a real challenge for advanced students and even tecahers:

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

We Are What We Eat



We Are What We Eat - a set of infographics on the topic of healthy (or unhealthy) eating with an interesting visualization of over 500,000 foods in the world with good, medium, and poor healthy rating. As many other infographics, the resource is a good way to organise some kind of discussion in class. Showing the eating topic from various angles gives the teacher an opportunity to organise students' group work, where each group presents their part of the problem:
We eat less healthy than we think,
When we eat matters,
Where we eat matters,
Who eats what,
Eating habits are contagious.

Find Your Line

Humanities Enrichment has recently posted a very interested video - Find Your Line - a good source of inspiration and motivation for the students, a good start for a discussion.

Monday, March 18, 2013

New on Printables Page

April, 1st: download and enjoy! (April Words Calendar on TpT)

Get Ready for World Water Day

World Water Day is held every year on 22nd March to remind people about the importance of freshwater and encouraging the sustainable management of freshwater resources. 10 Resources for World Water Day from Teaching News will help teachers plan and conduct the lesson on this important issue.

Friday, March 15, 2013

More on About Words Resources Page

The Half-Life of Metaphors from The Economist  and  Do you salad or sandwich? The verbing of English from OUP with interesting examples of what is going on in English, why, and how we use it.

DIY - Become a Maker!

DIY - "a community where young people become Makers. They discover new skills, make projects in the real world, and share their work online to inspire and learn from each other." The resource may seem to be very far from learning English, but the idea itself is very interesting and can get children interested in the process, improving the language along the project. The resource is suitable both for working with the class and individually with a student or one's own child.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Much for Inspiration

Venspired is a great site with inspiration posters from Kessy Venosdale. The posters are beautifully designed, with great words from well-known people or the author herself - a very good resource to use in the class for inspiration, motivation, discussion. The posters will look wonderful on the classroom board. There are downloadable posters from the author.

Talking about Food

52 English Lessons to Talk about Food from PhraseMix is of much help for both teachers and students to in rich the vocabulary on this very important every day topic. As usual, all the phrases are with listening and word explaining.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

More Language Games from Macmillan

It has been written already about Irregular Verbs Wheel from Macmillan Dictionary. Here there are more language games to keep students interested and motivated. Red Words Game  (testing your intuition on word frequency) and Phrasel Verbs Game (practising the knowledge of phrasel verbs) will help students to learn more aboutthe language.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Today is World Literacy Day

10 Resources for World Literacy Day from Teaching News. The resources are very useful and can be easily used not only on the World Literacy Day, but of course, in everyday practice.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Pronunciation Practice

Need more pronunciation practice? Look at the following collection of pronunciation resources for a number of sounds and letter combinations. There are videos, minimal pair exercises, tongue twisters, dictations and other things to work with the sounds. As an example:

Unit One: TH, as in THINK, BATHROOM, and TEETH.
  • Watch this QuickTime movie on the word 'Thought' to see how to correctly make the 'TH' sound (894k).
  • Minimal Pairs (178k) In this exercise, you will hear pairs of words that are the same except for one sound. In this case, TH is being compared to other similar sounds. Listen and compare.
  • Try this Dictation to practice the differences between TH and other sounds.
  • Here is the complete lesson from our workbook in MP3 audio , as well as the PDF version.
  • Here's a video of Brian explaining the differences between the voiceless and voiced TH. (7.8mb)
  • Listen, practice, and record your voice to have a conversation with a native speaker (microphone required).
  • Practice these tongue twisters to improve your TH (microphone required).