Summer Holidays! Yes!

Tuesday 23^rd June

Dear students,

 

I hope you are enjoying the beginning of summer holidays.

Some of you will already stay at the beach; others, will be there in short.

I’m sure you will have lots of fun and you will make new friends.

I want to tell you that it was very nice to meet you and I have enjoyed the time we have spent together in our English class. I know you haven’t enjoyed so much! But I would like to think that you learnt a lot and had fun while doing it.

I have learnt a lot with you! Especially about music and songs. And about your hopes and expectations for the future.

 I also hope – not hope, EXPECT – you have passed all your exams.

Enjoy the summer and charge your batteries for the upcoming course,

Lots of love,

Your teacher.

P.S.: I would have liked to see you so as to say ‘Have a nice summer!’

Some of the things we did was writing a story. Do you remember?

This is the beginning of your story. (Lucía started)

 Once upon a time in a village of England, in summer, seven kids lived an adventure ...Their names are: Sara, Alicia, Lucía, Alex, Guille and María.

Every afternoon they were together because they had a good time. One day, they went to the forest in the village. In the forest they found a chest. In the chest there was a magic book...

Then, María continued the story.

…in the chest, there was a magic book. Nobody knew what to do with the book. After a while they decided to take it to the village and tell the other inhabitants. Together, they decided to take the things to the museum of the old village.

When it started to feel dark, Lucía, Sara, Marcos, Alex, Alicia, Guille and María went home and had dinner all together. At night they started to hear strange noises outside the house and began to feel very nervous…

SARA CR

At night they started to hear strange noises outside the house, and began to feel very nervous. The noises said "um, um, um, grum, grom, grum", and suddenly the door opened. There wasn´t anyone in at the in the door!!!!!!, so they went out and started to run to the forest. In the forest a magical force caught Guille and Alice, and they started to shout at the other guys...

Alice and I walked in the forest to see our friends but we are alone in this strange place. We stayed in the forest all the day and in the night we prepared an improvised bed to sleep. But it wasn't important because a magical door appeared in front of us. We decided to go through it and 10 seconds after that, we appeared in Leganes, our town. But it's amazing... not amazing, VERY SCARY! It’s midnight and there isn’t anyone in the streets... only thousands and thousands of zombies. They shout and run to catch us. We are very scared and go to our English Academy and lock the door, but …

By Guille

...Guille and Alice heard a noisy, they walk slowly, entered their class and they met with Sara and Marcos!! They said that the Magic Force had taken them there. Sara, Marcos, Guille and Alice were in the academy for two days, until they decided to leave. It was  very strange because there weren't any zombies in the street. Where are they? The academy suddenly brightened and they reentered and there was the Magic book!! It wasn’t possible because they gave it to the museum. They opened it and...

By Alicia

…and began to read the book. The light went out and they could not see anything. It was very scary. When Sara came back to turn the light on the book had disappeared and they were not at the academy, but each one had entered a different dimension and they would have to endure two different waves of zombies that came before them. But they would not fight alone, some little elves would be with them to help. Guille and Alice realized that that was why there weren’t zombies in the streets...

By  Gonzalo

… and they entered the dimension of zombies. There was only one way out but nobody knew what it was. They were thinking for several hours until Alex, Gonzalo and Lucía found the way out. The only thing they had to do was saying the best quality of every one of them. When they did, the portal opened and everybody could go out. When Guille and Alice were going to get out,… the portal closed …

By Alex

SEE YOU!

The Presentation of your Project!

Tuesday 16^th June

Hi guys!

How are you? I guess you’ll be looking forward to your holidays…same as everybody!

Lucía is lucky because she’s starting her holidays this weekend! Enjoy at the beach, Lucía. Relax, have a good time and practise your English!

Sara has a Trinity exam tomorrow. I think we’ll see each other but if we don’t LOTS OF GOOD LUCK!!!! Although I’m sure you’ll pass.

As for María, I hope you get better and you can go on your school trip to Italy! It was a pity not seeing you in class yesterday. Get better soon.

What did we do in class?

We revised the test paper and I answered your questions and tried to clarify your doubts.

Then, we recorded a video for Design for Change, in Spanish. We told them about our project and that we wanted to give away the money we got at our market; so, we had thought of donating it to them. For their educational programmes.

You rehearsed a bit and we invited your parents to watch the presentation of the project YOU had made! I hope they liked it! I also hope they are able to see the effort you’re making by explaining it in English.

Remember that we have class next Tuesday 23^rd June!

I nearly forgot! The winner of our last term games was….LUCIA!

Well done, Lucía!

Listen, Read, Write ... Test!

Tuesday 9^th June

Hello! How’s everybody?

You must be very busy studying for your exams. I’m busy correcting exams!

I must say that your English tests are good, although they could have been better. Much better, because you can speak English better than the tests show. Better than >>>>>>>> comparative

 

Your listening skills are good, generally speaking. Grammar is rather good except for ‘present perfect’. We have been with this tense all the course and you still can’t use it properly! (correctly). If you don’t study the list of irregular verbs, you will never be able to use it! Have been>>>>>> present perfect.

Reading comprehension is Ok. I mean, answering the questions about the texts but the problem is that you don’t read the instructions!  What part of ‘Answer the questions with whole sentences’ or ‘…complete the sentences with three to five words from the text’ didn’t you understand? Reading also means to read the instructions of the exercises!

But, the overall result is good! You did it well! But a little effort and you will get bigger results!


Don’t forget that we have to present our project next Tuesday. Get your ‘speech’ ready to introduce every of the steps we followed. And to tell what every stage consisted of.

            GAME 9                                                                                                          

Player 1	6
Player 2	5
Player 3	7
Player 4	8
Player 5	6
Player 6	---

Good luck in your school tests!

See you on Tuesday!

Holidays are Nearly Here! Let's Travel around the World!

Tuesday 2^nd June

Hi guys!

How’s everybody? Busy? Yeah, I can imagine.

There’s so little for the course to finish and there are so many things to do…

…exams, shows, theatre plays…

It seems that the reason why Gonzalo didn’t come to class was exams. On the other hand, Alicia was acting in a play…and that’s why Sara left earlier. Because she wanted to attend the play. Yes, these first days of June are a bit of a mess!

First of all, I want to congratulate Lucía on making the video for our project. IT’S GREAT! THANK YOU VERY MUCH IN THE NAME OF ALL THE CLASS.

And talking about the rest of the class, what about your work on the project? If you have a look on the previous blog, and as I told you in class, we distributed the roles. Everybody had to explain a different stage of the project!

We started the class with a communication activity to review prepositions of movement.

We worked in pairs. You had to draw the itinerary of a cross country race on a map. Then you had to describe the route to your classmate and s/he had to draw your route on the map. After that, you swapped (changed).

We continued revising present perfect to talk about general experiences.

We use “Have you ever…?” because they are general experiences and we don’t ask or say “when” we had them.

·           Have you ever found any money in the street?

·           Have you ever won a prize?

·           Have you ever asked anybody famous for their autograph?

·           Have you ever forgotten an important date?

We found out (discovered) that Lucía won a gold medal in a gymnastics competition.

Remember the use of already, just, yet with present perfect.

Already and yet have the same meaning, but their position in the sentence is different. Yet, goes at the end of the sentence whilst already has a mid-position, that is, it goes before the main verb – the same position as adverbs of frequency.

Study these sentences:

·         ?   Have you finished the exercise yet?

·          -    I haven’t finished yet.

·         +    I’ve already finished.

·         The structure, to have + just + participle refers to an action that has been completed a short time ago.
 I’ve just arrived home. (Right now. A short time ago) 
Try this exercise Still/ Already/ Yet/Just

Don’t forget to revise comparative and superlative adjectives and will / won’t to talk about the future, for the test.

Test contents:

Listening – grammar exercises (present perfect, already, yet – comparatives – will / won’t) – reading – writing – speaking.

Vocabulary related to celebrations and festivities.

For practice reread the compositions and readings we have done in class.

And to finish the class, We played a board game called “Around the world in 100 days!” no, not this.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The game consisted in throwing the dice and following the instructions we had on the square we had landed. Sometimes we had to make decisions, sometimes we didn’t. For example, you land in Berlin: “You’ve forgotten your traveller’s cheques! Go back to London and get them! So, you had to go back until the ‘London square’. Delhi: “you’ve started to feel ill, what do you do? a) Go straight to the doctor. b) Stay in your hotel room and wait. c) Push on with your journey.

One of the answers made you lose no time, another one meant to add four days to your journey time and another one made you add seven days.

Did you make the right choice? Did you consider the advantages and disadvantages of going to a doctor in India, keeping travelling despite your illness, going to an Indian hospital…?

The winner was the team who got to the end of the journey, that is, who got to the finish square making the journey in the fewer days. Lucía and Guille  won although none of you were able to finish in 100 days! They made the journey in 111 days!

I hope Alicia’s play was a success! (very good) I also hope that Gonzalo passes his exams. And please, revise a little for our assessment test.

See you next Tuesday!

GAME 8                                                                                                         

Player 1	10
Player 2	3
Player 3	---
Player 4	3
Player 5	3
Player 6	---

 Festivals in the UK

 See you on Tuesday!

Opposite Verbs

Tuesday 26^th May

Hi! How are you?

I guess (suppose) you are tired because most of you had a lot of exams this week! Cheer up! It’s Friday today and you can rest during the weekend.

TGIF!!! (it stands for Thanks God It’s Friday)this is what Katy Perry says in her song ‘Last Friday Night’

What did we do last Tuesday in class?

We read about horoscope predictions and you made your own predictions for some of these star signs. Some of them were a bit gloomy! (Dark, sad, unhappy)

We made other predictions such as:

1.    Do you think it’ll snow?

2.    No. It isn’t cold enough. But I think it’ll rain.

3.    Come on! You’ll be late for school!

4.    We won’t finish the painting today.

5.    You’re right. It’ll get dark in a short time.

We practised opposite verbs.

1.    What time do you leave home in the morning?

2.    What time do you arrive at school?

3.    When I open a door I never know if I have to pull or push it to open it!

4.    I’m happy because we won the match but I’m sorry for the team who lost.

5.    How many emails did you send yesterday? And how many did you get?

6.    Study hard and you don’t fail your exams. You’ll pass all of them!

Then, we talked about our ‘Design for Change’ project.

We commented on the videos we had recorded and divided the work for the presentation. Lucía volunteered to piece the videos together. So, she’ll be in charge of the 4^th stage: Share. And we divided the rest of the responsibilities into the rest of you. Don’t forget to write your part because that is homework.

On this video you can see the different stages of the project.

Remember that we are :C7 – Tuesday

Project name: “No sad people in the streets”

Objective: Making people smile.

Stages: Feel: brainstorming ideas about the things we don’t like in our school, neighbourhood, academy and we wanted to change. Dividing the ideas into clouds of information. Voting for an idea. In our case: “Making people laugh”.

Imagine: giving ideas about how we could make people laugh. Where to go, what to tell them, what to do…

Do: drawing emoticons and writing sentences and/or words to cheer people up and going to the park.

Share: we took photos and recorded videos of the different stages of the project.

Review and opinion: asking the group what they think about the project. If they were satisfied with the result, what they would change, if something etc.

And we finished the class with ‘Flipped Class’

The topic of our last ‘Flipped Class’ was summer. I’m very sorry that Guille, Gonzalo and Lucía didn’t prepare anything for the kids. That wasn’t very responsible on your side!

As for the others, well done. You did a great job on summer vocabulary!

Remember

End of course test: Tuesday 9^th June

Presentation of project: 16^th June

GAME 7                                                                                                         

Player 1	2
Player 2	7
Player 3	7
Player 4	7
Player 5	2
Player 6	2

See you on Tuesday.