Make yourself at Home

General

This lesson is aimed at students with a language level of B2  (upper-intermediate) and focuses on revising, learning  and using vocabulary  related to homes, houses and rooms through a variety of engaging activities.

Topic: Houses, homes and rooms

Level: Upper Intermediate and above

Time:  60/90 minutes

Materials: handout 1

Task 1. Revising, introducing and using vocabulary.

♥ Part 1. Mind mapping.

Ask students to work in pairs. Write on the board a mind map as the one below to help them revise vocabulary related to this thematic area. Allow them some minutes to complete their mind maps and get feedback from the whole class, completing the mind map on the board with their suggestions. Then, give them handout 1, explain difficult vocabulary and ask students to talk about the kind of house they live in and their favourite room in the house.

♥ Part 2. A Game

This part requires some preparation. In advance, you need to find two rooms in a house belonging to two famous people.( see mine below)

Ask students to work in pairs. Student A faces the board and Student B sits with his back to it. Display the picture of a room with the OHP (if you do not have one, stick the picture on the board) and ask student A to describe it in as much detail as possible to his partner. Student B, using a clean standard A4, needs to draw the room. It would suggest beginning the description of the room by saying where the big things in the room are: windows, doors, sofas/beds etc….

Once they have finished, they compare with the original and have a good laugh.

Elicit some adjectives of personality and start a class discussion about how a room can reflect the owner’s personality. Ask students to try to guess what kind of person the room belongs to.

After the discussion, surprise your students by telling them it belongs to a very famous person in their country and ask them to guess who this person might be. Show them.

Repeat procedure for student B.
Conjunto de Fichas creado con GoConqr por cristina.cabal

Task  2. Listening and speaking

In this part, students in small groups will talk about some home-related issues. Questions will be introduced by  short videos, which will hopefully encourage discussion.

♥ House of the future  (I’ll use the first 3 minutes)

After watching, students discuss the video and these questions:

  • What will the house of the future be like?
  • Will we have robots to help with household chores?
  • Do you think houses will be more environmentally friendly in the future?
  • Houses use a lot of energy. What things could be done to make houses more energy efficient? What sort of energy do you think will be used to heat our houses?

♥ Renting out your house  (I’ll just use the first two minutes of the video)

After watching, students discuss the video and these questions:

  • Have you ever used an accommodation sharing site?
  • Have you ever rented out a property to tourists? Would you do it? What are the pros and the cons?
  • Would you rent out a room in your house to a lodger? Why (not)?
  • If you had a property to rent out, what kind of lodger would you prefer and why?

♥ Pallet House Project

The inspiration for the Pallet House Project came from the fact that 84% of the world’s refugees could be housed with a year’s supply of recycled American pallets. With one and a half year of pallet production in the US alone, 33 million refugees can live in a Pallet House.

After watching, students discuss the video and these questions:

  • What strange materials do you know of that have been used to make houses?
  • Is homelessness a problem in your country?
  • How difficult do you think is for homeless people to find a job, or get a house?
  • What does your government do for the homeless?
  • What can you do to help them?
  • Why do you think people become homeless?

I hope you enjoyed the lesson!

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Two Handy Tools that Save the Day

Audio, Create your own stuff, freeware, General, Resources,

There are about 10 ideas for posts on my to-write list, but this is definitely a post I have meaning to write for a long time and that for some reason or another I never got around to writing it.

This post is not about English; it has nothing to do with vocabulary or grammar. It is just a post featuring two tools that might come in handy.

♥ KeepVid  might prevent you from having a nervous breakdown when after spending Sunday afternoon preparing activities with content from You Tube or any other video site for the coming week, you find that Internet is not working. Sounds familiar? Of course, as well-seasoned teachers we can always resort to plan B  or plan C, but isn’t it terribly frustrating?

Keep Vid is a handy tool for downloading video. As they advertise on their site:

Keep Video Downloader is a free web application that allows you to download videos from sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch.Tv, Vimeo, Dailymotion and many more. All you need is the URL of the page that has the video you want to download. Enter it in the textbox and simply click ‘Download’. KeepVid will then fetch download links in all possible formats that the particular site provides.

Remember that if you want to download videos from Facebook, you will need the url. You can get it by right-clicking on the video to get its hidden url.

♥ Downsub.As for the second useful tool, how handy could it be to have a tool that downloads subtitles from YouTube? Very!

Well, this is what http://downsub.com/ does for you. The only thing you need to do is enter the url and choose the language.

Hope this blog post has been helpful! Keep posted!

The Sore Thumb: A Subject-Verb Agreement Quiz

General, , , , , ,

Yes, I am doing this. I am publishing this post. And I am publishing this post even when I am well aware that it is going to stir up controversy.

How does she dare, I can almost hear you say, create a quiz about subject-verb agreement when she is not even a native speaker?

I might regret it, but the truth is that I sort of needed to clarify in my mind one of the most obscure points of grammar in the English language- namely that of subject-verb agreement-,  because contrary to what one might think a singular subject in English does not always demand a singular verb, and what looks like a plural subject might not be so and take a singular verb instead. To top it all, when there is disagreement among grammarians, both singular and plural forms can be used.

To create this quiz, I have done a lot of research on the Internet and read what some noted grammarians have to say about this issue and  I have found that they don’t always agree. For this reason, I have tried to avoid the most controversial subject-verb agreement issues.

Hope you find it useful!

 

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A Word on Grammar: Infinitives or -ing Forms as Subjects of a Sentence?

A word on Grammar,

Is it…

  • To learn English is important?   or
  • Learning English is important?

A long time ago, having an infinitive as subject of a sentence was just normal. So you could easily say:

  • To learn English is important  or To eat healthy food is good for you

However, in modern English having an infinitive as subject of a sentence is very unusual, especially in an informal style. Instead, we use:

  1. “it” as the subject and put the infinitive  clause later.
  • It is important to learn English
  • It is good for you to eat healthy food

2. -ing structure

  • Learning  is important
  • Eating healthy food is good for you

Hope you have found this post useful!!

Source: Practical English Usage  by Michael Swan

Activities for correcting writing in the language classroom

Common Errors, Writing, , , , , ,

Here’s my latest contribution to the British Council magazine Voices: “Activities for correcting writing in the language classroom“. The article encourages students to correct their own writing and it contains  6 error-correction activities which are a lot of fun.Who said learning English was boring?

You might also be interested in reading  “Nine ways to revise English vocabulary using slips of paper” published in December where I suggest  nine activities for revising English vocabulary using simple slips of paper.

Thanks for reading!