Tag Archives: online

Lyreach.com : learning through songs

Audio, Grammar, Listening, Music, Resources, Vocabulary, , , , ,

I can’t imagine life without music but much though I love listening to it when I’m driving, working, relaxing or having fun, you won’t see me bringing music to the classroom just because. There is always a reason to choose the song I ask my students to sing. It could be either because it contains a certain structure we are working with or because of its vocabulary or its phonetics, but there is always a reason
This is why when I bumped into this site lyreach.com I was thrilled as it offers the possibility of typing words or idioms or structures as you might expect to get them in the lyrics. The lyrics of about 470000 songs are stored so the hard part is choosing which of these songs you would like to work with. Then you click on your choice to see the paragraphs that it appeared in, the title of the song and the singer and sometimes a clip from Amazon.com
In this case I was looking for a song containing Adjectives with too and enough and this is what I found.

You might be interested in having a look at these songs:

Using jokes to teach Grammar: ESLjokes.net

Funny Stuff, Grammar, Resources, ,

Why the hell (excuse my enthusiasm) does a lesson have to be boring when you can teach grammar using jokes and unbelievably the only thing you have to do is a click away.
ESLJokes.net offers us ready-made lesson for teachers and for students. The jokes are graded as elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate and upper intermediate/advanced and they cover lots of grammar points from present simple to reported speech.


If you are student, you can use them for autonomous learning because it also provides the answers to the exercises and if you are a teacher, then this is just pure heaven! Everything done for you!
I’m planning to use the one about the Penguin (please, see Intermediate) to teach reported speech and I’m sure my students will be glad to have reported speech introduced in this way. Wouldn’t you if you were a student?

Want to learn English through music? Lyrics Training helps you

Audio, In the Computer Room, Listening, Music, Resources, , , , ,

Do you want to learn English and/or French, Italian, German… through music? Well, if this is so, this is your place. This cool site is called Lyrics Training and it’s just amazing and hear this ,free to use!

This is how it works: at the bottom on the right-hand side you can see some lyrics, choose according to your level. There are three: easy, medium and hard. Then, when the window with the song you’ve chosen opens up, choose your mode; again, there are three, beginner,(fill in the blanks10%), intermediate (25%) and expert (full lyrics).

Now, this is what you’ll see if you choose  the song Tell him  in the beginner mode.  One of the best things is that if you get to a word and you can’t understand it or if it goes too fast, it will stop until the blank has been filled. The song literally WAITS for YOU!!!

But there’s even more. If you click on HELP at the bottom you can see what else the programme can do for you. Let’s imagine that you want to listen to the same line again, press Backspace, and if you are still unable to understand the word, don’t worry, just press TAB and the word will be written for you. Aren’t you dying to give it a go!!

Editing students’ written assignments

Create your own stuff, Resources, Writing skill, ,

This post is mainly intended for anyone who needs to add comments to a written document. In my case and being a teacher, it has been used to correct essays as more and more often my students seem to be committed to saving the rain forest by not wasting unnecessary paper and sending me their assigned tasks via email instead. I have often used Jing to explain their mistakes but this is an easier way to do so and, in my opinion, as effective.
Of course, I am aware that most of you know how to add comments to a word document so this article is only for those who, like me, have just discovered some of the miracles MS Word can do to help us spice up the always boring task of corrrecting compositions. Before you read further you might like to see an example of what can be done with the Reviewing Toolbar.

 

Where can you bring this toolbar up? Navigate to the View menu bar and select Toolbar and then Reviewing and you will see the Reviewing toolbar appear with a set of icons you’ll have to learn. Then, select an area of the text that you want to comment on and click on the “Comment” icon, type your comment on the red bubble which will appear in the margin. I have found that in MS Word 2003 the red bubble will only show if you’re in the Word Print Layout View or View Web Design .
That way the document looks as it might if I had printed a version of the original and I had marked it up with a red pen.
Another thing you can do is cross out a word(s). To do this you select the word(s) you want to cross out and choose Format/Strikethrough.

Easy, isn’t it? I hope you find it useful !

Learning Chocolate… learning vocabulary

Resources, Vocabulary, ,

Learning Chocolate… I wonder why they’ve chosen this name for a website that helps students improve vocabulary but it certainly does so and in a very efficient way.
There are lots of vocabulary categories to choose from ranging from the easy  Numbers or the Seasons to the more sophisticated Insect Life Cycle.

How do you learn with this page?

Choose a category and begin to learn by choosing from five different activities. Every exercise is taught and revised with the help of pronunciation: for example , in some games you have to match the audio to the word or the words to the pictures and you can also do  a ” fill in the gaps” exercise or a dictation.

What I specially like about this site is that it uses visual aid to help students learn better and faster and at the same time  teaches them how to pronounce  .

So,  I was going to point out that working  with Learning with chocolate  you kill two birds with the same stone but noooo…. you kill four birds … ’cause you can learn Chinese  Mandarin or Japanese too. As always , the choice is yours!

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