NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

All the best in the Brand-New 2017 !!!

Mr New Year is well-known for making people to make resolutions.

Why not to get carried away and make a few promises?  

It is always worth a try.

And even if you don't meet your expectations, you'll still be a winner - 

YOU'VE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE RESOLUTIONS IN ENGLISH.

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Today, two ways to do that:

1. Use the phrase:

I WISH I COULD ....

Mine is: I WISH I COULD BE MORE ORGANISED. 

2. Use the phrase:

I WANT TO  (which you can shorten to I WANNA)

Mine is: I WANT TO VISIT 3 NEW COUNTRIES THIS YEAR. or

              I WANNA VISIT 3 NEW COUNTRIES THIS YEAR.

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Now, time for your New Year Resolutions.

Don't be hard on yourself. Make a few but let them be valuable!

If you are a teacher, you can start your first lesson in that very New Year with making e.g. a Resolution Tree with your students.

Make them familiar with the phrase - write it on the whiteboard and give them a few examples of your own plans to improve your life this year ;).

Ask them to write one resolution on a slip of paper - help with the vocabulary they need.

Tack the slips of papers to the board in the classroom e.g. in the form of a tree - you can use it later as a topic for a warm-up discussion about their progress.

You can use I WANT TO with less-advanced students and I WISH I COULD with more advanced ones.

If you like music, there is a song to listen to as a nice finish-off and here it comes:

For I WISH

For I WANT

That's it.

Get up and make your New Year Resolution come true!

PRONUNCIATION TIC TAC TOE - long schwa

Not to beat around the bush, straight to the rules:

1. Choose a sound you want to practice, e.g.          ɜː;
2. write its phonetic form on the whiteboard;
3. choose 9 words with that sound, e.g.
    word, work, bird, thirty, turn, journey, early, heard, service,

    (you can point out that 

       * it's possible for a single sound to have many different written forms - and that's what makes English pronunciation hard to master,

       * this sound usually includes "r" in the written form);

4. practice how to say the words;
5. draw a table ... like this:

6. divide the class into groups (you can have more than two groups)

7. assign each group a symbol, e.g. o - x - Δ ;

8. decide which group starts the game; 

9. a group wins the square if each member of the group pronounces the word correctly.

That's basically it. 

Enjoy!

THE ELLEN, HUGH LAURIE & SLANG

Here comes the video,
quite catchy with teenagers;
they watch "The Ellen Show" and know Dr House very well.
Last but not least - it's dangerous: you may end up laughing out loud while watching!

Just ask your students to draw a table like this:

or like this:

then enjoy the show while your students write the words and / or the definitions!


... oh - I've almost forgotten ... the video ;)