Friday, April 29, 2011

Ready for the Royal Wedding of the year?

The event of the year in the UK is finally coming along. At this same hour, Prince William & Kate Middleton will be celebrating a state dinner with their guests and spending their last hours as single people. Probably when you read this, they will already be man and wife. And on such important occasion, bearing in mind that we are fans of "All Things British" and we just LOVE happy endings, we had to be there. Why can't we practise our English while witnessing THE event? Let's take a break of so much football and speak about something else. Surely, even if you don't care at all about it, you've got something to say.

If you're planning to watch the wedding, why not watching it in English? Watch in live on bbc.co.uk

Other than that, here you can check:


Play the Royal Wedding game: take the William & Kate challenge!


Maybe YOU want to have your say on this. What do you think? Are you going to watch the wedding? Are you a royal wedding fan? Do you enjoy get-togethers with your family and friends to comment on the ceremony and guests' attires? You couldn't care less about it? Do you think events like this are ostentatious and unnecessary? WRITE A COMMENT!


After the wedding takes place, we'll update this post! HAVE FUN (...or not)

Sunday, April 3, 2011

WRITING SKILLS - BASIC PUNCTUATION

One of the skills that is usually more difficult for students of English as a foreign language is writing. When we write, all that we have learn comes together and shapes up in a text: our grammar, our vocabulary. We mistakenly tend to assume that the way English speakers punctuate sentences is the same as in Spanish. But this is not true. There are different conventions as regards the use of the full stop (.), the comma (,) or the question mark (?), just to name a few. But before having a look at some basic punctuation rules in English, let's learn the name of the main punctuation marks:


. full stop (US - period)
, comma
? Question mark
! Exclamation mark
: colon
; semicolon
( ) parenthesis
[ ] Brackets
- dash
... ellipsis
"" quotation marks
/ slash
- hyphen

Now, let's see some basic punctuation rules. Click here. (source: BBC skillswise):

Basic puntuation quiz

Games

Basic punctuation worksheets


Why don't you also have a look at:

capital letters

making sentences


Spaniards have a hard time with learning how to use commas in English, so here you have some help:


using commas


Saturday, April 2, 2011

NI (B1) Passive voice

Dear students and readers of this blog,

Still in our Intermediate level class, we have been studying the passive voice.

The passive voice is a grammatical construction (a "voice") in which the subject of a sentence or clause denotes the recipient of the action (the patient) rather than the performer (the agent). So with it, we put the emphasis on the action itself, and not on the person or thing that did it. Remember i is much more frequently used in English than in Spanish!

Here you will find some help:

Active voice/passive voice from Englishclub.com





Allow me to recommend you the videos below. It is a simple, but clear and helpful way of explaining the passive voice. Enjoy!




NI (B1) My wish list

Dear students and readers of this blog,

Do you have a with list? Do your wishes come true?


In our Intermediate level class we've been talking about wishes, and how to express a wish that something would change or a regret for something we would like to be different. For that, we have different options. Here you have some interesting links:







Wishes

by Rose Fyleman

I wish I liked rice pudding,
I wish I were a twin,
I wish some day a real life fairy
Would just come walking in.

I wish when I'm at table
My feet would touch the floor,
I wish our pipes would burst next winter,
Just like they did next door.

I wish that I could whistle
Real proper grown-up tunes.
I wish they'd let me sweep the chimneys
On rainy afternoons.

I've got such heaps of wishes,
I've only said a few;
I wish that I could wake some morning
And find they'd all come true!

Friday, April 1, 2011

1º NB (A1) The woderful world of the past simple tense...

Dear students and readers of this blog,
Welcome to the wonderful world of the past simple. You will have no time to get bored; there are lots of things to learn. Here you have some links and videos I'm sure you will find useful. Enjoy!











Forming the past simple:



Forming the negative:



Some irregular verbs:



If you want to pronounce the regular -ed forms of the past correctly, watch the video below:

NI (B1) Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you...

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather." ~John Ruskin


"If you can say nothing appropriate, limit your remarks to the weather." said Mrs. Dashwood, in the film "Sense & Sensibility", to her youngest daughter Margaret, after she revealed that her sister Elinor was in love with the shy, but kind, Mr. Ferrars. They say that the weather is one of the favourite conversation topics for the British. So we'd better get ready for it, don't you think?



  • Englishclub.com weather vocabulary

  • learnenglish.com weather vocabulary

  • Weather idioms



    • What a lovely day today, don't you think?