Describing cities

photo from the program  archive 

 

Students created posters of their favorite cities.  They used descriptive words and had to provide a minimum of things about their city.  Ss really enjoyed the activity.

week 17 idea - CS - Shamsur Rahman

This week we studied how to talk about a current life situation, then describe a negative feature about it, and then how to a wish to change that situation in the past.

Week 17 West and East London b1/b1+ PowerPoint Presentation

photo from the program archive

Students this week were busy getting their PowerPoint presentations ready to go with their speaking presentation. Some students had not used power point before so was very good for them to get some experience with the help of the teacher on how to make a presentation with power point. 

Good job guys!!!

posted by the classroom teacher.

Week 17 West London B1+ individual mind maps on requests

photo from the program archive

Students in west London made their individual mind maps and chose one that they thought was the best all round effort. Well done everyone for your creative work.

Students chose 8 things their friends ask them to do for them and had to make a mind map of how they would ask the request and how they would answer it. 

Spelling exercise with sentences

Students were given a dictation of words to spell.  They were allowed to use a dictionary and after showing the teacher their correctly spelled words, they had to use the words in sentences.  This activity is helpful for remembering words and learning how to use them correctly.

Mind Map Practice

This week I had the students practice mind maps about the topic they will do for their presentation. I am hoping that this will allow them to gather more information to include in their presentations. I have given them a variety of topics to research and include in their mind maps. They then had to come up with supporting facts or info.

Week 16 review - CS - Birmingham, Lancaster - Shamsur Rahman

This week we concentrated on cities, going to visit places and the necessary English required for this context.

We studied 2 grammar rules, namely;

1: How to make a direct question indirect to show politeness

2: Some nouns for count and non-count.

We then sort to apply these two rules in to specific contexts, like for example,

1: Talking about transportation

2: Asking for and giving information

3: How to talk about a city.

Although I don’t have pictures of our conversations, I will try to describe scenarios students created to apply the studied grammar by merging them together within a context.

In the context of ‘asking for and giving information’, students learnt to combine and merge the two rules together like so;

Student 1: “excuse me; do you know where I can find a cheap restaurant in this area?”

Student 2: “yes of course, but there are many cheap restaurants in this area, you can find some behind that street”

And then they rotated it with a different question/answer to cover both grammars.

In the above example, the two students used BOTH grammar rules in ONE context logically. They were then required to memorise their conversation to present it to the class on Thursday as part of their quiz.

END.

Week 16 b1 East London: Job Interview

Students this week discussed job descriptions and employment questionnaires and to follow on had to write a job interview between a company owner and a job candidate. 

Students had to include questions and answers on salary education history employment history working hours and all questions they know companies would ask.

Week 16 - Biography

Students had to research and write a biography of a famous person living or dead. Students were given famous names such as Abraham Lincoln, Bill Gates, Ghandi, Mike Tyson and Mr T to research. I wanted students to use grammar forms that they have learnt over the semester including but not limited to 'gerunds', 'infinitives', 'passive sentences', use of the past simple and past continuous. This exercise was the purpose of revision and for students to practically apply what they have learned.

Week 16 Geography

This week we focused on using prepositions - in, at, to, into in all of our writing assignments related to country and geography.  We explored new vocabulary and wrote about things that affect the environment like erosion.  Pictured below is an example of simple sentence writing at the A1 level in getting used to proper grammar with preposition and descriptive words (adjective and adverb) coupled with the new geography words.

Week 16 West London b1+ Careers mind map

Week 16 West London b1+ Careers mind map

Students in west London class were busy making their mind maps on careers.  Students chose in their opinions the most in demand jobs. Then they had to add descriptions and pros and cons for each career. 

Week 15 East London b1 Consequences

Students discussed and wrote positive and negative consequences to certain actions. 

For example if Stuart spent all his savings on a computer what would the consequences be?? Good and bad??

Students enjoyed the discussions of different actions. 

Quiz Week 15- Los Angeles

This is one of my students quizzes from this week. We went over the present perfect and unusual activities throughout the week. As you can see, not all of the answers are correct, but this student clearly showed that he was able to retain some of the information we studied in the previous days.

Preparing a curriculum vitae

Students worked in groups to structure a curriculum vitae. They viewed templates on line and then decided upon suitable categories, personal information, education, experience skills etc
They then started to draft their own cv

Adverbial clauses to express personal feelings

students spent this week studying adjectives related to personality. Once they had a firm grasp of the meanings I decided to incorporate these adjectives to the grammar that they studied which was adverbial clauses with 'when' to express personal feelings. Using the same adjectives, students had to write a sentence with an adverbial clause that provided a definition without using the adjective.

week 15 - cs - shamsur rahman

This is the summary of this weeks lessons in one conversation, students are memorizing this conversation today as part of a quiz.

West London b1+ week 15 information gap crossword

Students in west London class were given information gap crosswords. One student had the answers for words going across and one student had the answers for words going down. 

Students had clues for each other to help them get the missing personalities in their crosswords and they had to help each other figure them out by describing it or doing actions or naming people who are like that personality in the classroom. 

Students enjoyed it as some had not done crosswords before.

Week 15 RW Past tense

This week we concentrated mainly on past tense. Recalling our weekend events, looking at grammar skill building and looking at a short clip of media to describe what happened.  During the course of working out and remembering to correct our mistakes students wrote on past events. Then after seeing the teacher as they progressed through the assignment, they hopefully saw their errors and learned from them as they continued to write.  As you can see, the first day of this assignment the student completed it only part way (corrected in red), when he had extra time the next day in class he finished it making fewer mistakes (corrected in green), therefor showing progress in his learning of the past tense.

Reflecting on Term 2

Dear Team,

We had an excellent term full of learning opportunities for students . What was the classroom task or activity that your students liked most in Term 2? Why do you think they liked it?