Pronunciation: Irregular verbs

A UFO sighting

Audio taken from esl-lab

Bassar Al-Assad

BassarAl-Assad

Robert G. Edwards

This description has been written by Nerea Palacio, 3.A

Robert G

Norman Foster's description

Norman Foster

Describing people

At the 3rd level, we have been learning how to describe people physically. Here your have a good example of that. Congratulations Markel!

DILMA ROUSSEFT

Traditional English Breakfast

1960s commercials

This term we are going to read this book: The secrets of Silver Lake. Our first exercise has been to predict the plot of the book. My students have written a short paragraph about the book and this is the result. Well done!

My students' project

As I commented on a previous post, in January we started a new project from the HTB program. Our final product was a digital story based on the news. Here we have the results and some of them are very good. There is a long list of videos and I'll try to upload most of them.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE by Olatz, Aritz and Andoni

Our school banks on the post-16 education

We are again in the media. Here you can read an article about our town and our school.

Tears of change (HTB project)

http://www.digitales.us/story_details.php?story_id=80

Innocent lost: Child labor in Nepal

INNOCENCE LOST: CHILD LABOR IN NEPAL (6 min.)

About half of the population in Nepal, 11,258,000, is under the age of 18. About half of those children work in bondage, and a majority of them work regularly. Children in Nepal are working in difficult circumstances often as slaves. They work in carpet factories and at brick kilns, in domestic service and in agriculture, on plantations and in constructions, in stone quarries and in transportation, in coal mines and as migrant workers.

TEENAGE PROSTITUTION

40 thousand Nepalese girls under 16 in Indian brothels are forced into prostitution.

The trafficking of girls from Nepal into India for the purpose of prostitution is probably the busiest slave traffic of this kind anywhere in the world.

Nepalese girls as young as eleven are trafficked into India.

COAL MINES

With no opportunity for agriculture in the mountains, many ruined families that live in the hills are forced to send their children to work in the coal mines. They work long hours with little to eat or drink. Often they get only rice or clear broth to eat.

The children work in hazardous conditions.

Children are often sent to work long hard hours in factories. The conditions are often dangerous, sometimes even working with chemicals or toxic waste.

CHILDREN LABOUR IN RESTAURANTS

Approximately 80% of the children work 14 hours per day.

Many of them are forced to work a variety of jobs in restaurants.

Many children also work as servants in the homes of the wealthy, where they are often sexually abused.

FAMILIES TORN APART

Street children earn their living by selling newspapers, cleaning garbage and even begging.

In Nepal, it is estimated that there are 5.000 children who’ll laid on the streets of cities due to varied socioeconomic and sociopsychological reasons and family violence.

SOLD INTO SLAVERY

The burden of a large family, poverty, lack of awareness and the existing traditional culture are the baselines that compel and encourage parents to sell their children into slavery. And most of the time, their parents don’t even know where they are. The only time that children are allowed to go home is during annual religious holiday.

Children are not going to school due to their parents’ financial problems and are involving themselves in the worse form of child labour.

They are also compelled to work in vulnerable conditions to support their families. Parents sell their children into slavery for about 60 American dollars a year.

Economic and educational opportunities must be provided to the Nepalis.

In this way, we can return the innocence of childhood to the children of Nepal. Innocence that now is lost.

A picture is worth a thousand words

In our class all of you agreed with that sentence. Do you remember the creamy and crunchy ice cream in the picture? Hundreds of words came to our minds at the sight of the image.
Now you have to prepare a post in your blog with this title: A picture is worth a thousand words. You will have to include:

• A suggestive picture
• A caption: at least 25 words with the feeling you have while seeing the picture.
• Your name
• The tag (etiketa): English

The deadline for your post in the blog: 17th of January

Here you have an example of the post.


This is Garazi and her new rolling skates. In this picture you can see the first day she decided to put on all the stuff and start skating. We spent a long time trying to fix the knee pads, the elbow pads, the hand pads and the helmet. She was really exciting, but she almost moved a pair of metres along the pavement. We really enjoyed!





Some of my students' posts: Nerea, Aritz, Mikel,

New year, new projects

As we have commented in class, this term we are working in a new project: Materials for an Integrated Approach to Languages. The language subjects: Spanish, Basque and English are working together with similar materials, similar methodology and similar aims.
The type of text we will deal with is Narrative. The fild is the language in the mass media and the topic in our English subject will be "You Be the Reporter".
Our main objectives are

• To recognize interpretative and informative journalistic genres.
• To recognize and to employ features of new articles, newspaper reports and digital stories.
• To get to know and analyse the resources used to value and interpret events.
• To develop a critical mind towards information in the mass media.
• To learn to criticize own productions and peers' ones with the aim of improving linguistic competence.

At the end of the unit, the students working in groups will produce a narrative text: a digital story. We will publish our productions on the Internet (our blogs, the school's web,...)

Back to school again!

The new year has just started and we are a year older, but the term continues ...
In this situation I always remember a traditional song by Gene Autry. Sure you haven't heard of it, but the title is quite suggestive.



- Gene Autry Lyrics

And, of course, it reminds me the "squeamish" film Sleepless in Seatle. Sorry, but I love that film.

Who is Tavi Gevinson?

That 13-year-old girl started writing her blog in March, 2008. As the media says, she loved fashion and commented on fashion designs. Here you can read the first post of her blog:

Well I am new here.... Lately I've been really interested in fashion, and I like to make binders and slideshows of "high-fashion" modeling and designs. I'd like to know of neat websites and magazines, so comments are welcome. I plan on posting pictures in the future, but for now, I'm just getting started. Yours truly, Tavi

But now she has become a guest in the front row in most important fashion shows, she appears on TV and newspapers, and she has even invited to visit the most important designers in Tokio.

Click here and visit her blog. It could be interesting.