Weekend Activities

Mustafa's fab GoAnimate production:

GoAnimate.com: trial by mustafablc


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Can you guess what Mustafa did this weekend?  Make some guesses, or ask him questions to find out more information.

Thanks, Mustafa!

Here's another fab GoAnimate creation from Mustafa using some weekend expressions.

idioms by mustafablc on GoAnimate

Word cloud created by Mustafa Balci

Can you guess what Stefan got up to?  What are these images about???  Ask him questions to find out more.  Thanks, Stefan!

Images by Stefan Lapniewski

Can you guess what Janet did over the weekend?

As seen in the examples above, you can get your students to talk about an image from their weekend.
They can also create a Word cloud of their weekend activities and then send you a link, or a jpeg image for you to add to your blog or wiki.  Open class you can quickly make guesses of what the students got up to.

Alternatively, you can get your students to say one thing about their weekend and you add the words to a word cloud tool in class.  Click create and then in groups get students to remember why the words were added to the group cloud.  Please see the example from this morning's lesson.

Can you remember who said what about their weekend??

Instead of the whole class doing their own word cloud in the first example above (which could be time-consuming), maybe do a rota system, so that every Monday morning you can focus on a few students at a time, over the period of the term?  That way, everybody gets a chance to have their image up on the screen and be the focus of attention.....

Comic created by Janet 

 Fodey Newspaper Snippet

You can ask your students to create a newspaper article about their weekend by using fodey.com as in the example above we created in class.


QUIZLET 

Use Quizlet to test yourself on Weekend Phrases!

Did you do the folllowing over the weekend?

Can you match some of the phrases below?

Are the following phrases TRUE or FALSE for the class?

1. Janet watched the BOX over the weekend.
2. Aga PICKED UP some slang expressions such as 'bloke', 'bits & bobs' and 'broke'.
3. Alicja didn't GET THROUGH a shedload of DOSH.
4. Anush SPENT A BOMB at the weekend. She got through a GRAND!!
5. Edu GOT LEGLESS last night at the LOCAL.
6. Betty RAN INTO some friends in town yesterday. 
7. Emel put off DROPING her MATES A LINE.
8. Juliana POPPED IN to see a class MATE last night.  
9. Kasia BURNED THE MIDNIGHT OIL last night.  She studied phrasal verbs & idioms all night long!!
10. Stefan was AT A LOOSE END last night.  He was really bored.
11. Magda had a nice LIE-IN on Sunday morning.
12. Mustafa PICKED UP quite a few new expressions.
13. Midori bought some BITS & BOBS in London.
14. Pilar HIT THE TOWN on Saturday.  She went pubbing & clubbing with her MATES.
15. Khalil CHILLED OUT on Saturday.

 ToonDoo Questions:

You can make your own cartoon weekend questions to ask your students at ToonDoo.
If you want to keep them all in one place, you can easily register for free. 

Vocaroo
I recently reviewed some weekend expressions using my Smartphone to record questions to ask my students. I then uploaded the audio file from my phone to Vocaroo, and then embedded the Vocaroo embed code to my blog. Students had to reply open class / in pairs as soon as they heard the question.  Please note, your Vocaroo audios get deleted from the system after a period of time, so use the audio while you can!
 

Idioms: An Idiomatic Love Story

Teaching Idioms Effectively with Web 2.0 Tools from Janet Bianchini

Collage of An Idiomatic Love Story above created with Big Huge Labs Mosaic Maker

This is Frederick, the hero of  An Idiomatic Love Story. 

Below is a Slideshare presentation of an Idiomatic Love Story.

An Idiomatic Love Story from Janet Bianchini

Here is a GoAnimate animation of one of the 10 chapters of the ebook.  The hero Frederick, abandoned his girfriend Isabella, and then turned up again a year later....

 An Idiomatic Story Part 4 by Janet Bianchini on GoAnimate

Animated Presentations - Powered by GoAnimate.

The idioms in the story can be pre-taught by handing out a set of flashcards printed from Quizlet. 

Connecting Online: A Global Collaboration
I have collaborated with a group of educators from around the world to write a book called: Connecting Online for Instruction and Learning: International Perspectives.

The first chapter is called Teaching Idioms Effectively with Web 2.0 Tools, and part of it is free to read:-))

I wrote a blog post all about it on my Janet's Abruzzo Edublog.

Padlet

The Padlet below (formerly known as Wallwisher) has been created to gather new words and phrases whilst the group is at the Lake School....

Created with Padlet

You can find out how to use Padlet for various projects here.

Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers blog has written about Three Good Ways to Use Padlet  in Your School.

Rudssell Stannard has produced a video tutorial of how to use Padlet (formerly Wallwisher).

Writing Activities

Storybird is an excellent site for creating digital stories. Here is an example:




Another site I like is Bookr - http://www.pimpampum.net/bookr/

Here is  an example called Oxford - My City




One site I use a lot for getting my students to write short texts is this newspaper snippet tool from fodey:

http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp

Mini Sagas

Writing a mini saga is a challenging activity and it is also a lot of fun!  The objective is to write a short story in only 50 words.  It has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. The original idea came from the Daily Telegraph paper which ran a very popular Mini Saga competition for the first time in 1999. You can read someof the mini sagas.

You can click on the link to view a complete One Stop English lesson plan called Writing Skills: Mini Saga.

Finally a message to you from a talking cat :-)  Have a fabulous wekend!!

Reading Activities

What's the Story??

I asked the class to predict the content of a topical news item from today's issue of The Guardian Online.
I copy pasted the words from the article into a word-cloud making site called Word It Out.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/royal-mail-strike-ballot-privatisation

Then we played bingo with the words in the word cloud.  I read out parts of the text and everyone crossed out the word if it was the same as what they had written in one of the 9 boxes as seen in the example below.

We played the first round for a straight line, and the second time was for a 'full house'.

Baby Prince George Alexander Louis

An online reading text from BBC News on the names of new-born baby Prince George Alexander Louis could be preceded by a Tagxedo word cloud such as the following:

The English Blog has some great news items concerning Prince George and we looked at a few cartoons from the British press.

Some useful sites mentioned by the group included the following:

ESL Printables: http://eslprintables.com/

Breaking News English: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/

Busy Teacher : http://busyteacher.org/

One Stop English has some free esl reading materials, although you have to pay to become a member and receive over 8,000 printable lessons.

I mentioned a lesson on chickens that was created by special request by Sean Banville.

http://www.listenaminute.com/c/chickens.html

Below Frederick the cockerel who keeps his beady eye on me ...

Finally after a very intensive day of activities, we finished off by creating a word cloud with whatever was in teachers' minds at the time.

Language, Life & Culture in the UK Today

A double decker bus is one of the most traditional sights in England.  Listen to my message via Fotobabble, a voice recording tool.

Sightseeing in Oxford



These two objects are typical in England, but it's quite unusual to see them so close together in this remote area.

 Image of telephone box, postbox and Malverns taken by @elt_pics flickr photo set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/6655141215/in/set-72157628672427593

I took this photo in Oxford of an idiom on the back of a bus - 'Saving is as easy as pie' 

MUSTAFA sent in an image of a poster for the coach to London.  It has a great grammar structure - 'let someone do something', as seen below.  Thank you!

 

EDU sent in a picture of an interesting idiom he spotted on the side of a bus. Cheers!

STEFAN spotted the interesting notice on a lamp post below, and then took a photo of it to include in this post. Many thanks!!

Another traditional sight is the local pub.  There are many pubs here and this one is in Broad Street opposite the Sheldonian theatre.

Real ale is a traditional type of beer that you can drink in this pub.

If you go to the local tonight, then hopefully you won't end up getting :

A typical dialogue in the local might go like this:

A  It's my round.  What can I get you?
B  Cheers, mate!  Half a lager would be great.
A  Do you fancy some crisps?
B  Yeah, why not..
A  Any particular flavour?
B  I'll go with salt 'n' vinegar, if that's ok?
A  No probs.  Back in a mo'.

Below I have embedded an ebooklet on places around Oxford.  I simply took images then added them to a presentation and then uploaded the pdf version to Issuu. You too can take photos of signs and places in Oxford, and then use them in class to exploit areas of interest such as vocabulary, grammar and cultural aspects of your visit. This is a form of digital literacy. You can read this publication called The Skills Transformation: Digital Literacy Explored, written by Gavin Dudeney.

You could enocurage your students to take snaps of interesting signs and places and then show to the class to discuss.

Some useful sites

The English blog is a useful source of news about life in the UK. It updates frequently and I like it because it always has the latest news and daily cartoons from the papers. 
Woodlands Junior School is a rich source of information on British life and culture.

Multiple Intelligences

According to Howard Gardner there are 8 multiple intelligences.  Can you list them?
You can find out more information and take a test at the BGFL Mulitple Intelligences site here.

Here is the result of my test.  What does it show about me as a learner?

  

Learner Styles

The acronym VARK stands for Visual, Aural, Read/write, and Kinesthetic sensory modalities that are used for learning information. http://www.vark-learn.com/english/index.asp Vark learner worksheets: http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=helpsheets