Food for Thought at TESOL Spain 2013
Posted: March 10, 2013 Filed under: Talk | Tags: advertisement, cooking, food, images, personalisation, speaking, vocabulary 4 Comments »Thank you to the TESOL Spain team for organizing a great conference. As usual, I wish I could have split myself into two or more parts to get to all the talks I wanted to….
Here’s the handout for my talk. Thanks to everyone who came – I hope you enjoy using the activities.
The Snowmen
Posted: December 10, 2012 Filed under: Advert, Animation, lesson plan | Tags: advertisement, Christmas, jigsaw, John Lewis, observation, speaking, vocabulary 2 Comments »
Image made using photos taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics by @nutrich, @cgoodey, @thornburyscott, @steve_muir, @evaguti and @leoselivan used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/“
This time last year John Lewis released a sentimental advert featuring a boy who can’t wait to give his parents the perfect Christmas present, and we based a lesson plan on it. This year’s version is in a similar vein. Featuring a love-struck snowman, the ad contrasts nicely with the more irreverent take on the traditional Christmas commercial from the makers of the infamous Scottish soft drink, Irn Bru, which we’ve also included in this activity.
Click here to find out what we did with it.
Flash Anzan
Posted: November 29, 2012 Filed under: lesson plan | Tags: abacus, Flash Anzan, pronunciation, reading, speaking, vocabulary 8 Comments »One of my students prepared an activity for class last year where we made our own mini-abacus and learned how it’s used to make calculations in Asia, something that was far more interesting than it sounds! His son was learning the method – called “Aloha” here in Spain – but known as Soroban in Japan. So when the Guardian ran an article on Anzan (and you’ll have to read to find out!), I had to take advantage. The video of a Flash Anzan competition will blow your mind……
Marry You
Posted: June 13, 2012 Filed under: lesson plan, Song | Tags: Bruno Mars, listening, marriage proposal, speaking, vocabulary, word cloud, YouTube 4 Comments »
Could this be the best marriage proposal ever? Featuring the world’s first live lip-dub proposal, this video has gone viral with millions of views since it was uploaded less than a month ago.
Students start the lesson with a vocabulary and writing activity using a word cloud made up of the lyrics to Marry You before listening to the song Bingo-style. They then work together to design a video to accompany the song, going over the top on the romance, and present their ideas to the rest of the class, who vote on the most romantic (or the most clichéd). Lastly, they get to find out what the world’s first live lip-dub proposal is and go home to listen to the song again on the expert setting at lyrics training
Click here for the Teacher’s Notes.
Evolution
Posted: May 22, 2012 Filed under: lesson plan | Tags: evolution, images, personalisation, reading, speaking, time-lapse, vocabulary, YouTube 8 Comments »
Inside Every Good Dog
Posted: May 7, 2012 Filed under: Advert, lesson plan, Song | Tags: dogs, listening, observation, ordering, personalisation, speaking, vocabulary, YouTube 2 Comments »
Horace by Rob Stringer
During first day “getting to know you” activities in my classes, the subject of dogs usually comes up. Like many teachers, I bring in photos related to my life for one reason or another and ask students to guess the connection. One of the photos is of a dog. After establishing that it’s the dog I would have if I were to get a dog, I ask students who has a dog, who likes dogs etc., and more often than not, dog owners and dog lovers make up the majority of the class. And that’s the topic of dogs done and dusted. We move on to the next photo, I make a mental note to get more mileage out of dogs, and never get round to it. Until now.
This lesson is based on an advert for Purina, a pet food company, which may make the dog lovers in your class have a “cute attack” or even go a little bit misty-eyed! The lesson starts by exploiting the the song used in the advert , then the images, and finishes off with a ranking activity and some conversation. All the way through, there are lots of opportunities to use both canine and non-canine related vocabulary.
Click here for the Teacher’s Notes..
Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty
Posted: April 10, 2012 Filed under: Animation, lesson plan | Tags: Granny O'Grimm, listening, Sleeping Beauty, speaking, translation, word cloud, YouTube 2 Comments »“Gritting my toothless gums in seething RAGE is what keeps my skin taut.”
“That’s what really annoys me about Twitter. Can’t do the disappointed sigh and the threatening silence just becomes – silence”
“In the grand World Cup of life, I am of course in the group of death”.
These are just a few of the things Granny O’Grimm has to say on her Twitter page . So when she reads Sleeping Beauty to her granddaughter, you can probably guess that it isn’t going to be the traditional take on the story.
In this lesson, students talk about some traditional fairy tales before watching the Oscar-nominated Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty. They then use their imagination (and / or memory) to fill part of the story with adjectives before retelling in the style of Granny O’Grimm. Finally, they write the subtitles in their own language. If their language is Spanish, they can compare their version with one that has already been put on YouTube, and if not, they could go to overstream to subtitle the clip in their L1.
Click here for detailed Teacher’s Notes
For more about Granny O’Grimm, see her website . Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty was written by Kathleen O’Rourke , directed by Nicky Phelan, and produced by brownbagfilms.
