Animals and Pets

Animals and Pets Infographic

Common vocabulary related to animal and common pets.

• List of common pets

• Body parts

• Adjectives to describe pets

• Actions. Verbs related to animal actions

• Objects related to pet world

• Taking care. What we do to properly take care of our pets

• Animal sounds

Tap image to enlarge

 

English Pronunciation with Genial.ly

Time to play!!

These days I'm trying some of Sandbox Educación extensions to create Genial.ly games for my students. As you may already know, possibilities are endless!!

I've tried creating a Memory game to practise English pronunciation with some homophones.

It's a small game with a few words but you can reuse the template to change words, images and so on.

Hope it helps!

English Homophones

Irregular Plurals

Just a short post to share this list of irregular purals in English.

At the botton half of the sheet you'll find some words with a Greek or Latin origin.

Get ready for the FIRST Cambridge exam

As I did for the PET Level Cambridge exam, I also collected questions, and answers, together with some resources, during a course to prepare the FIRST Level Cambridge exam.
(See my list of resources for PET exam)

In this paper you will find:

• Dictionaries
• Sample paper exams
• Sample online exam
• Listenig, reading, grammar....exercises

Donwnload PDF

Get ready for the PET Cambridge exam

When teaching I usually encourage students to ask questions and ask for more information than the one given in the book, I trully belive that students learn what they really need to learn. Besides, it's a good way to keep them engaged and create a good class atmosphere.

During a course to prepare the PET Level Cambridge exam, I collected all those questions, and answers, together with some resources.
(See my list of resources for FIRST exam)

In this paper you will find:

• Dictionaries
• Sample paper exams
• Sample online exam
• Listenig, reading, grammar....exercises

Hope it helps.

Download PDF

3 ready to use Christmas activities

Christmas is coming, a time for having fun in class with English.

In this post I'm sharing 3 reading activities I found in ISLCollective.

🚩Remember to visit this site, you'll find lots of resources for your classes, well organised and ready to use 👍

1. On Christmas Eve. by MrsFrobisher

2. An English Christmas by SCouleon

3. Christmas time by 1mada

Playing flashcards games in class with Quizlet Live

Trying to make learning more collaborative and funnier, the team of Quizlet offers now Quizlet Live.

Quizlet is the tool that allows you to create sets of flashcards with the words of your choice, or just use sets created by other teachers. See more here




How to play Quizlet Live

• 1. Enter Quizlet.com and choose a set of flashcards

• 2. Click on "Live"

• 3. Click on "Create a game"

• 4. Share with your students the code you get

• 5. Tell your students to enter "quizlet.com/live" and write the code given

• 6. Students write a name/word to be identified in the group

• 7. You need a minimum of 6 students. Quizlet will arrange them in groups of 3/4

• 8. Teacher starts the game. If you want, you can reshuffle the teams.

• 9. Questions and possible answers appear on students' screens.

• 10. The race begins. Students get points by being the first in giving the correct answer.

At the end of the game, the teacher gets information about what students need to revise and what they already know.

Now it's time for you to try it and have fun in classroom while learning!!

Check this infographic to have cleare explanation.

Animals and parts of their bodies - Flashcards

New sets of Flashcards to revise some vocabulary while playing.

Remember you can print them, create some tests with this vocabulary, and of course, print these tests.

1. Animals (print flashcards)

2. Animals: Body parts (print flashcards)

Enjoy your learning!!


To know all the possibilities that Quizlet offers you, read my previous post.

Halloween Activities - British Council

Image by lumpi

Still in time to celebrate Halloween in the classroom.

Ready to use activities from the British Council's section "LearnEnglish Teens".

Levels B1, B2

Short texts with interesting facts about how British people celebrate Halloween. On line exercises or printable worksheets.

• True / False
• Vocabulary grouping
• Gap filling

Go to British Council page

Elementary English Adjectives Flashcards

When preparing lists of vocabulary for students, it's always difficult to determine which words you're going to include.

One never wants to forget those words that might be useful for our students in the future. But there's a point from which we must start, and here it is.

This is a list with some basic adjectives that every student should know. This is for an elementary level but students with a higher level can also play with them while revising.



And I said "play" because with Quizlet flashcards you learn by playing.

At the bottom right corner you can choose among:

• Four Study modes:
• Flashcards
• Speller
• Learn
• Test
• Two Games
• Space Race
• Scatter

Now it's time to start learning and playing

Print the list of words or print the flashcards

Vocabulary: Clothes & Jewellry

Recently, I've made a new set of flashcards using Quizlet. This time I made it to study some vocabulary related to Clothes and Jewellry.

If you don't know this tool yet, you can click here to read a brief summary to know the learning possibilities it has, included games.

Apart from the flashcards, you'll also find below a funny game from English Flash Games. Remember to check this fantastic web when you want your students to learn new vocabulary. They have a great variety of games.

Enjoy the games.

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Click the image to play

Word Games & Jokes

Holidays is a good time for having fun with English.
Forget about studying for exams and have some laugh reading the Reader's Digest magazine.
In this popular, general and family interest, magazine you can find:

• Knock-Knock Jokes
• Corny Jokes
• Funny One-Liners
• Cartoons
• Funny Stuff

If you like Word Games try theese ones. You'll improve your English Vocabulary while having some fun.

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Click on the image to play.

	Form as many words as you can!
	Find hidden words in the scrambled grid of letters!
	Try to break the code!
	Find the hidden words in the mess of letters.
	Are you a walking encyclopaedia?
	It’s all the fun of crosswords without a newspaper!
	Get ready to be wowed with wonderful word fun!
	Link letters and clear space for flowers to grow!

Images and games from Reader's Digest

Do or Make?

Here you have a set of activities to study "DO and MAKE collocations";

• A set of flashcards with the collocations and the translation into Spanish. At the bottom right corner, you'll find a box with different options to sutdy (or play with) this vocabulary.
• A test to put into practise this vocabulary (each time you take it, you'll find different questions).
• A game I found in the "English for everybody" web.

DO or MAKE Game

Download the list of vocabulary

Confusing Words; Crime

We are now studying some vocabulary related to "Crime" and my students find quite confusing the meaning of some of the verbs.

That's why I have prepared this kind of cheating sheet for them.

The Crime

Rob – Steal - Burgle

• You rob a place. ( You commit a robbery)
• You steal something. ( You commit a theft)
• You burgle a house / shop / building when you break into it using force. ( You commit a burglary)

The Criminal

• A robber robs a place (for example, a bank), of something.
• A thief steals something from a person.
• A burglar burgles a house by forcing a way into it and stealing from it.

Listening Activities

Some of my youngest students are asking me for Listening activities to impreove this skill.
Well, I've found this very interesting and complete site, full of Listening activities.

Click on the image to visit the web

Here you can find a lot of Listening Quizzes very well organised into different levels and topics.

Randall provides you not only with Listening Quizzes, but also Grammar explanations and exercises, Vocabulary, Pre-listening activities, Post-listening activities and even Online investigation exercises to go on practising.

I really recomend this site, either to use it online in the classroom or to encourage your students to practise listening on their own.

When your enter the site, you can see a huge list of Listening Quizzes. The only thing you have to do, not easy one, is to choose one of them. Just click on the title and you´ll see this scheme:

As I said before, there are lots of things to do.

Thanks to Randall practising listening is now easier and funnier.

Playing Irregular Verbs

Studying irregular verbs can be hard, why not playing while learning.

This time we're going to study irregular verbs with Quizlet.

To see how it works and create your own set of flashcards, have a look to this post.

In this post you'll find the following stes of flashcards:

  1. List of verbs: Inf. # past = past participle
  2. List of verbs: Inf. # past # past participle = -en

  3. List of verbs: Inf # past # past particple

  4. List of verbs: Inf. = past = past participle

  5. List of verbs: Gerunds

To start playing, click on the images bellow
(Click on the flashcard and you'll see the reverse)

1. List of verbs: Inf. # past = past participle

Download the "Irregular Verbs: past = past participle" list.

2. List of verbs: Inf. # past # past participle = -en

Download the "Irregular Verbs: past participle = -en" list.

3. List of verbs: Inf # past # past particple

Download the "Irregular Verbs: inf # p. # p.p." list.

4. List of verbs: Inf. = past = past participle

 
Download the "Irregular Verbs: inf = p. = p.p." list.

5. List of verbs: Gerunds

A Recipe Book

Sometimes giving/studying vocabulary is quite boring. To make it funnier and get the emotional advantage, we can let students prepare their own set of words to study.
This time we were working on Food vocabulary. We decided to write our own recipes but before doing this, we needed to know the vocabulary we were going to use.

These are the steps I followed to do the whole project, which included vocabulary and writing.

1. Vocabulary. Prepare a document with Google Docs where students can write the words they have to use. This time there were two categories; food and verbs.
2. Share the documents with your students. This way everybody will see what is already written and so you will avoid repetition of words. As a teacher you also will be able to see each student's contribution.
3. Writing. Revise / Teach the grammatical structures students will use to write their recipes.
4. Students write the recipes at home.
5. Check the writings and mark mistakes, so students can correct them.
6. Once you have all the recipes corrected put all of them in a Word Document. After that, upload the file to Issuu and publish it on your blog (or share it with your students).

You can see here my students recipe book.

I won't fool you, it's extra work for the teacher, but the result is really nice and students like seeing their work on the net.

Word Scramble

Here you have a traditional game to form words. I found them in Sheppard Software.
There are two versions of the games:

Word Scramble

In this game you have to use all the letters to form words.

  

Word Scramble II

This is a bit more difficult version of the game. This time you don't need all the letters to form the words.


In both cases you have a "Hint" button just in case you need it.
Click on the image, have some fun and increase your vocabulary.

Build up your vocabulary

Here you have another game from Novel Games.
In this game you have to form words, but you have to hurry because new letters don't stop falling down. The longest the words are the most points you get.
To make it easy, once you click on a letter the game shows you, in a different colour, the group of letters you can choose from.
Come on. How many english words do you know? And what is more important, how fast is your mind?

Letter Blocks

Are you a good "Code Breaker"?

Surfing again on the net, I found this game, and a lot more in Novel Games.
This game is very easy to play. When you start playing you have a message, but written with symbols!!!! The game doesn't give you any clue, so you have to use your imagination and guess the correspondence between symbols and letters. While you are playing you can't see if you are doing right or wrong, but there is a "hint" bottom to help you. Once you have finished you have to click on the "Submit" bottom and you'll know if you succeeded or not.
To play the game, just click on the name or the image of the game.
Enjoy it!!

Code Breaking