This is a special week. The students are getting together with students from other groups and the older children become teachers of the younger children for one day. It is also a special week because next Friday is Halloween, which is an important holiday in some of the English speaking countries, like the US.

Halloween is celebrated the Eve before the Christian holiday of All Saints and it begins a period of time in which people remember the dead.
Typical festive Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, attending costume parties,decorating, carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted house attractions, playing pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films. (Taken from Wikipedia).

In our last lesson we spent the first hour preparing activities for the younger children we got together with after the break. Also students practiced how to be teachers. They did a very good job and the little children who came to our classroom learned a lot of things with them. They learned about Halloween and the strange creatures we may encounter on this holiday: witches, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, etc.

At the end of the class we went trick-or-treating and got some candy.

When the small children left, we reviewed the homework and some of the students had the chance to play a game about the weather.

HOMEWORK

Listen to the weather forecast, then, answer the questions: http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/skills/listening-skills-practice/weather-forecast

1.    

What´s the weather like in the north of the country?

2.    

Where is it rainy all day?

3.    

Where is the best weather?

Good job with your homework most of you! It is good to get used to real English. That way, when you go to an English speaking country you'll be ready for them.

Yesterday we started to learn how to talk about the weather in English. Not that you didn't know anything about it, most of you did, but we are studying it more in detail.

I think everybody knows the question we ask when we want to know about the weather:

What's the weather like? That's the name of our topic.

If we want to talk about the temperature, from very hot to very cold we can say in this order:


Absolutely boiling, very hot, quite warm, quite cool, very cold, 

absolutely freezing.

We listened to a recording and then practiced the pronunciation of those words.

Then we were learning countries in Europe: Spain, France, the UK, Germany, Norway, Italy, Iceland, Austria, Portugal, Russia. Am I leaving out any of the countries we outlined in the map?
Hey, students already knew most of their capital cities: Madrid, Paris, London, Berlin...

At the end of the lesson we played a game on the computer. Students had to listen to a weather forecast and then drag the weather symbols to the right country flags.

HOMEWORK

Write your own weather forecast for 6 countries in Europe. You can say things like:

Ex: In Spain it is sunny and quite warm.
.
To get ideas you can check this link. It's the game we played in our class. http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/es/fun-games/whats-the-weather

You can also play this game and learn the symbols for different types of weather:http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/es/fun-games/weather-maze
 Play the maze once and then draw the symbols you followed in your notebook.

Have a nice week!

Wonderful group! Absolutely everybody did their homework.

And Gonzalo had a very active week with PJ. They did all kinds of things together. We didn't know PJ could play the guitar, for instance, but according to Gonzalo, he can. We are not sure how old is PJ, he keeps it a secret, bu he is a very quick learner.

This week PJ is staying with Ruben and we wish them a great week together. Next Tuesday he will tell us all about it.

Yesterday in our lesson students answered the questions: When is your birthday? and What year were you born? Some students were born in 2004 and other students in 2005.

Later they talked about their aunts an uncles. They learned the words married and single. Remember: husband and wife are married. Usually, a student's father is married to his mother.
When a man has not got a wife, he is single. When a woman has not got a husband, she is single.

First, we listened to a conversation between two friends: a boy and a girl. They are looking at the boy's photograph of his brother. The girl asks questions about him:

Who is that? It's my brother.
What's his name? His name is ... (Sang Ho)
How old is he? He is ... (26)
Is he married? No, he isn't. He is single.

Then, all the students read the conversation with a partner. Finally they role played the conversation, first with a partner and then all the boys together said the boy's lines and all the girls together said .the girl's lines.  That was a lot of fun and students remember the conversation quite well.

For the Olympic Games, students had to answer 5 questions.
We finished the lesson playing a board game. Students had to answer many questions about their family.

HOMEWORK

Watch this video http://www.real-english.com/reo/11/unit11.asp and answer the questions:

Is Kitty married?
How old is Ed?
Amy is married. What's her husband's name?
What's Julie's favorite color?
Say the names of 3 single people. (For example: Howie)

See you next week!

Yesterday was our 3rd lesson. .We welcomed the school's mascot: an orange dragon. Very cute, our dragon, but he doesn't say much, it's a bit shy. Or maybe it is very young, a baby dragon, and it can't speak yet.

Students proposed names for our mascot and then voted for their favorite one. The winner name was PJ, which is pronounced Pidzei, but some of the students preferred Johnson, like Gonzalo, who has been the first student in the group to take the dragon home. Perhaps Gonzalo will teach PJ a few words.

Gonzalo, you should take a photo of you with PJ  and publish it in the blog, if possible.

We continued practicing the possessive and family members. We looked at a new picture of 2 related families. On one side of the picture we had our well known family: Bill and Nina (husband and wife), who are Peter's and Cindy's parents. On the other we had their relatives: Amy and her husband (I don't remember his name) and their children: Ted and Kim. There was also another uncle: David, who is Nina's brother. So we talked about uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces.

HOMEWORK

Say the name of an uncle and an aunt. Ex. Uncle Roberto and Aunt Isabel.

Then answer the questions:

How many nephews has Aunt Isabel got?
How many nieces has Aunt Isabel got?
How many nephews has Uncle Roberto got?
How many nieces has Uncle Roberto got?

Whose sister is Aunt Isabel?        (Ex. She is my father's sister).
Whose brother is Uncle Roberto?  (Ex. He is my my father's brother).

Everybody brought some pictures of their family yesterday. It was GREAT. Good job, boys and girls!

Every student showed us his or her photographs and said:

This is my cousin, his name is Pedro

or

This is my mother, her name is Yolanda.

So, have you noticed? When we talk about a boy or man we say his name.

When we talk about a girl or woman we say her name.

Some students, like Nuria, have a very large family: with uncles and aunts and many cousins.

Most students had not done their homework, so we did part of  it in class. We listened to a song several times and students answered some questions about the song.

The teacher explained how to say the possessive in English: how to say that something or somebody belongs to somebody. It's a bit difficult but not so much:

This is Bill's son.

Mary is James' sister.

Mary and James are Diana's children.

This is my father's car.

This is Ruben's pencil.

Remember: 1st, the name of the person ( or what we call that person, Ex: my brother, then the 's and then, something that belongs to that person: car, children, sister.
The order of the words is the opposite in the Spanish construction.

Spanish:  El hijo de Bill.
English:   Bill's son.

Then, things became complicated, because each one of us can be different things at the same time, like me:
A
I am Helen's mother
I am Sophie's sister.
I am Julian's aunt.

So, for the OlympicGames we made 2 teams, and students had to look at the pictures in a book and ask:

Who is Cindy?

The boy or girl in the other team had to answer:

Cindy is Nina's daughter or
Fred's granddaughter
etc.

Or they could ask for help from the Joker or their team.

Homework
1/Write 3 sentences  about yourself (Ex.: A) and about 2 more member of your family.

Ex: This is my aunt Lucy. 
       She is Jake's wife.
       She is my father's sister.
       Aunt Lucy is my cousin Amy's mother.

2/Look at the Simpsons family tree and ask 3 questions like this:

Who is Homer's mother?
And answer:
It's Mona.