Week 30: April 29th, 2020- Vocabulary, Obama, humour and music

- Another day in a hellish technical failure but, well, we warmed up by talking about space austerity and how it may affect us, from the file in the last entry.
- We then had a look and revised adjectives to describe attitude and practised the pronunciation of spelling "th". It's in today's handout.
- We then saw a video in which Barack Obama, back in 2014, explained the need to organise the fight against future pandemics, a visionary. We revised some vocabulary and structures from it.
- We also had a look at some, pretty bad, jokes in English that played with double meanings and pronunciation.
    - The previous exercise reminded me of a Mark Knopfler song in which a knight sang a song for his lady, how he met her, fought for her and finally got her. A Night in Summer Long Ago. It's such a beautiful song. I wanted to have talked about it a bit more but it really was impossible. I hope you can enjoy it some other time.

Homework:
- I have seen this link on the positive side of the coronavirus outbreak, it would be great if you could read some part of it and tell us about what you've read.
- I'm also enclosing another reading just in case you want to do it, it's on fitness. Here you have the key for the exercises.

Week 29: April 22nd, 2020- Marmite, requests, fixing things and a poem!

Telegraph.co.uk

- We warmed up by talking about the topic of the reading/vocabulary handout I had given you on Marmite. We also mentioned the videos you had in the last entry.
- We practised the structures for requests we had reviewed the last day in this handout. We practised roleplays with this other handout.
- We then dis the error spot exercise on the second page of the above file.
- We celebrated Earth Day with a News Review from the BBC site, Can fixing things reduce climate change?
We revised these expressions and did a vocabulary exercise.
- We also wanted to mark Book Day, celebrated on 23 April and saw the structure of a well-known poem by Dylan Thomas in the form of a villanelle. This is the poem and here you have Dylan Thomas himself reading it. This poem may ring a bell to some of you because it appears in the film Interstellar, which I love so much, very poetic.

Homework:
- If you want to record a little something for me, I'd like it to be about the Marmite file I gave you, exercise 5 gives you some questions to organise and send me a short presentation about all of them. Take some time to organise it with linkers and everything.
- As you told me you had liked the file, here you have another one, full of vocabulary too, on space austerity.

Week 28: April 15th, 2020- Easter wall and making requests

- We exchanged opinions and feelings about the coronavirus lockdown. I celebrated your wonderful contributions to the Easter wall.
- We identified structures for making requests in three conversations and completed the gaps with them in their transcripts (see file Speaking Extra 6 in your email inbox).
- You have a pdf file of a reading exercise about a very interesting very British culinary ingredient, Marmite. This is for you to do if you feel like it.
- I'm enclosing very fun TV ads for Marmite for you to enjoy, there're lots of them as it's been a very typical spread for many many years.

- Marmite: First date

- My mate Marmite

- A new jar version: squeezy Marmite.

- A more modern and developed idea: the rescue team.

Homework:

- Apart from the Marmite reading and watching of ads, if you'd like to send me a recording for me to give you feedback on, here I give you an idea: tell me about new habits the confinement is creating in your routine. As an example is my arriving late to videoconferences! and explain a little.

Keep your English fit!

Week 27: April 1st, 2020- Destinations from home

- Dear students, although through technical problems we tried to do the following activities:
- You told the class about spring film releases, anecdotes, myths and legends about the spring.
- We tried to answer some questions about travelling, now that we're only travelling with our imaginations with the video Top 10 Budget Destinations for 2020.
- We practised consonant-vowel linking with BBC Learning English.
- We listened to Lemon Tree, by Fool's Garden and answered some questions about what the lyrics say.
- Lemon Tree is one of the songs in Lyrics Training. It's a wonderful website in which you get dynamic exercises to practise vocabulary and structures. You get different levels for the same song and it's fun and a really productive tool to learn.

Homework:
- For the Easter holidays I'm going to open a Padlet virtual wall with different tasks or challenges that I'll post on different days. The first one will be published here tomorrow!! Stay tuned to complete all the challenges! I'll also contact you with the information about the Book Club!

Here we have our virtual wall for your Easter homework, I hope you like it!!

Be careful... Easter break might be full of English!!!