Hallowe'en

This is a very good video to watch at Halloween, first because of its beautiful images and music, besides, it has the lyrics written on. It is about "The Kingdom of Witches" and it is a large poem that you can read on the screen or if you want to use it, you have a copy of it in this blog: Lestobada Secondary English Blog.

I wish you a spooky Halloween...HAHAHAHAHHAHA

I need a break!

Wikimedia

Girl suffering form anxiety

I am really sorry, but I need a break. I am doing so many things at the same time that I am really at the end of my limit. I am taking two online courses, giving private lessons to an old student, trying to keep up with all the work a teacher who cares has to do... Besides, I also have a family and friends. I am  sorry but I am taking a break from this blog. It seems that not many people are visiting it and, those who do, do not leave any comments.

 It is getting difficult for me to write about topics that my students will profit of and if I do, I do not have much time. I will continue to write the homework in the blog so that everyone can follow that and I will try also to be active on Twitter, but I am not going to write for a time, how long? I do not know, I hope not much, maybe at Christmas?

For those of you who usually read me, excuse me. I really need this break!

Xscape in Glasgow

This summer I went to Scotland, as many of you already know. It is a very special city, one of those in which you may think: "I would like to live here". It was a highly industrialized city and now it is changing its path. The town centre is really like a big shopping centre where you may find all of the main shops.

Glasgow has also got one of the oldest cathedrals in Scotland because they changed the religion to protestantism so that it was not burnt down like the rest. It is also special because it has two different levels as the result of the fact that the location was not chosen by an architect, but by the stopping of an oxen charriot carrying the dead body of the saint patron of Glasgow, Saint Mungo.The Town Hall was under construction when we went, so we could not see it, but they say it is amazing.

There is also, from the end of the 19th century, an artistic trend in Glasgow emerging from the Glasgow School of Art whose most prominent artist was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, forerunner of Modernism and Art Nouveau and whose architecture is still in the streets of Glasgow.

Another of the things I wanted to do in Glasgow, was to visit the Xscape centre which our book, Switch 2 , talks about. It is not really in the city of Glasgow, but in a nearby location called Renfrew (in an old power station called Braehead) where you find a huge shopping centre and the leisure centre. You can see some photos of the impressive indoor skiing slope, its bowling alley and the rock climbing site.

Do you have something like this in your own town?

Would you like to have one? Would you like to visit Glasgow or the Xscape centre?

Thanks for sharing!!

Subject and verb agreement.

It is sometimes difficult for younger students to understand what is that thing called Subject and verb agreement, especially because at schools, we do not have enough time to practice on this. The ideal way would be to practise orally many times until they internalize it. Fortunately, we still have internet to practise on their own at home.
First, a brief explanation:

• The person who speaks is the first person, singular (I) or plural (we, my sister and I, the students and I...)
• The second person is the one who listens, it can be singular or plural (you, your friends and you, your brother and you...)
• The third person is the one the first and second speak about: it can be singular male (he, Pete, my father...) or singular female (she, your sister, my mother...) or a thing or an animal, that is, singular neutral (it, my dog, the table...); it can also be plural ( they, my friends, Mary and Peter, my dogs, the chairs...

It is important that students understand well the relationships that are established in any conversation and their changing nature. The second step is to really learn how verbs work, we are going to focus on the two most usual verbs and the present simple this year in 1st of ESO, basically they will have to learn this chart:

V. to be	V. to have got	Present simple
I am	I have got	I (verb)
You are	You have got	You (verb)
He/she/it  is	He/she/it has got	He/she/it (verb)+s/es
We are	We have got	We (verb)
You are	You have got	You (verb)
They are	They have got	They (verb)

I am leaving some links to exercises so that you can practice:

• Anglomaniacy, very easy exercises in which you have to move the subject or the verb to the one it agrees with.
• This one to start with: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/cgi-shl/quiz.pl/sv_agr_quiz.htm
• Towson University includes more present simple exercises.

I will work this with my class. I hope it helps. Do you master this?

What time is it?

It looks easy but it is not so much for students who do not know how to say the time in their own language. I hope this helps me and other teachers explain how to do it in an easy way. I made this infographic with a picture editor which you can find online and is free (except for some features) called PicMonkey, very easy to use.
In order to practise this issue, I strongly recommend the British page Teaching Time, with its demos Stop the Clock and Bang on Time, which students love.

So, what's the time?

Our noticeboard is back!!

I am just writing to let my students know that our homework noticeboard is working again; you can see it just where it was, on the right side of the blog . I have to thank the Blogger forum because they gave me a solution to this problem quite quickly and are ready to give a long-term solution to it.
I will be writing soon! It's being a hard start for me this year.

Problems in Blogger with the text gadget.

Homework 2nd October 2013 1ºA: p. 7 nº 10. 3ºA: p. 11 nºs 3 y 4, p. 12 nº2. #iestartessos
— Ana García Álvarez d (@AnaGarciaTeacha) October 2, 2013

I'm having problems with the gadget of text in which I usually wrote the Homework, it doesn't save the new information, so I have decided to take it out. This happened to me on Monday and I have been trying to fix it since then, I even tried to make a photo of the homework but the image gadget is not working me either. So I have decided to tweet the homework every day on Twitter, in that way, it will appear on your right as usual, just that it will do on the Twitter widget. I hope this gets fixed so we can get back to the blog; I do not want my Twitter account do this : ( , but if it helps...
If there is anybody who knows how to fix it, please tell me!
I would appreciate any comments on this.