Have I ever told you that I’m not a morning person? Fortunately, at the EOI, I work the afternoon shift otherwise I don’t think I would be able to get a coherent thought out of my mind in Spanish, let alone in English, and I’m sure this is something my demanding students would not be too happy about.
Have I ever told you that I’m not a Monday person either? I very much prefer Fridays… ha,ha,ha … just joking!
Let’s start Monday with a smile on my face and three cups of coffee in my body and this selection of websites to help my Elementary students improve their Listening Skill. Hope it is helpful,guys!
I am going to teach Elementary Level a lesson about shopping and I have found this very easy short video to get started. There are so many things to learn/revise when you are teaching about going shopping! Teaching Going Shopping gives me the opportunity to revise numbers and prices, the shops in a city, items of clothing and a variety of questions including offers and requests. There will be several steps ending up with the students, hopefully, being able to use interactional language in a role-play situation. An example here
Watch the video (if you don’t want to see the introduction, start 40seconds into the video) and answer the questions. Then, activate the subtitles to check your answers.
These are two sites to learn English and practise Listening through films.
♥Learn English through Movies : Practise your English with trailers and video clips. Basically, you need to watch the video and do different tasks. You always have the choice of taking an easy or difficult Fill in the Blanks Exercise Quiz .
♥Lingual.netwhich provides interesting movies, with subtitles, scripts, and quizzes, to help you practice English listening. They have a variety of videos: music, comedy,…etc They also have some games like Listening Master you need to try.
It is said that your signature tells a lot about your personality. What do you think?
Try this simple exercise. On a piece of paper write a short note to someone and then sign it. Done??? Let’s now analyze your signature. Ready?
♥If your first name is more prominent than your surname , then you have positive feelings about your childhood and your “private” life is more important than your “public” life.
♥Do you use initial letters in your signature? If it is in your first name , then you want to keep your personal life more secretive
♥If you have a legible signature, then you have clear ideas and objectives. If it is illegible , then you are less confident and tend to avoid conflict.
♥If you have a rising signature, then you are optimistic and ambitious. A descending signature will indicate you lack self-confidence and tend to get depressed. A horizontal signature will suggest you are a well-balanced person.
♥If you sign in capital letters, then you are arrogant.
♥Finally, if your signature is bigger than the rest of the document , it means you have a high opinion of yourself and if it smaller you might be insecure and have low self-esteem.
Well, well… after learning all these things I might consider changing my signature. What about you? Do you believe in Graphology?
Watch this video where a graphologist analyses the signature of several famous people and try to answer the questions
Question 1. What does the underscore in a signature tell us about this person?
Question 2. What do we learn of Elisabeth I from her signature?
Question 3. According to the expert, what does a rising signature indicate?
Question 4. What does an underscore looking like a dollar sign say about the person?
Answers: Watch the video again in youtube (click here). Activate the subtitles feature and check your anwers.
Voa Learning English really needs some serious exploring. Though I have to say that, in my opinion, the site is a bit of a mess, it could be a great help to some autonomous learners.
What does it offer? The site provides interesting articles based on news and information. The stories are read slowly, or at least at a slower speed and it allows you the possibility of reading the story and listening to the audio at the same time. The mp3 audio can be downloaded, which is also very helpful.
What about the level? Difficult to say because although the stories are read quite slowly, the vocabulary is quite advanced. You’ll just have to try and see.
Stories are divided into Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 and very often there are exercises following the audio.
if you further explore the site, you will find a section “Learning English TV” with captioned videos that will allow you to watch a story while reading the rolling script.
But there are two sections that I absolutely adore that deal with idioms and expressions:
Another interesting feature in this site is that it has a built-in dictionary. You just have to click on any word to get its meaning. You really need to give a go to this interesting site, especially if you like reading the news and are interested in American English.
