New Year's Resolutions

With a New Year on the horizon, many English and American people make resolutions or promises to improve their lives.

Here you are a list of the most common New Year's Resolutions:

-Lose weight

-Eat healthier foods

-Get more exercise

-Give up smoking or drinking

-Spend more time with family & friends

-Learn something new

-Help others

-Save money

-Get more organised

English and American people are crazy about New Year's Resolutions, there are many websites, videos, songs,... related to them and at the end of the year the newspapers publish reports about people's resolutions, advice about how to keep them and so on.
But how many really follow their resolutions?

Have you made any New Year's resolutions yet?
Good luck with your year's resolutions!

More vocabulary about this topic on BBC 6 Minute English

a special Christmas post

Hi everybody,
Here's a quick and easy Christmas lesson. It was suggested to me by a teacher in London, Mike Harrison. It's a short poem looking at Christmas from a new angle - that of Turkeys. Here's a link to the poem on the BBC website. The poem is called Talking Turkeys. (By the way, did you know that it's traditional to eat turkeys for lunch at Christmas in the UK?) You can read the poem there and hear the poet, Ben Zephariah,  reading his poem too. 

Or you can click on the link below and watch him perform it live. 







Or here's another version that Mike showed me, which is great fun as well. You can hear the poem and read it, line by line at the same time. Let me know which you like best!



OK, so that's the last class for this year. Hope you enjoy it! Please let me know what you think of it in the comments.

I hope you all have a great holiday, a very merry Christmas and a wonderful new year. See you back on the blog in 2011!

New blog task December 9

Hi everybody,
Here's our "class" for this week. I'm going to write half of it and record half of it. Let's see how it goes!
OK, here's part one:

Do you remember we were talking about early memories recently in class? Can you remember any of your very early memories? I'm going to ask you to write a short text describing that memory, but I don't want you to describe it as as adult looking back, I'd like you to try and take yourslef back in time. Try and get into the head of that small child and describe what happened from the point of view of you as a child. Give it a go! And when you've finished, listen to the instructions on the voki below for part two!



Get a Voki now!




I hope you got that! When you've finished, add your story here, in a comment box, in a new post, or send it to me by email. Thank you!

See you all next Wednesday at 10 o'clock. Remember, it's a longer lesson - three hours to make up for the class we lost this week.

Paco J.'s Fotobabble

Passion for animals

Hi, this is my daugther, Cristina, She loves animals, but she is very frightened. Well, this is the farm school "Buenavista"- Junta de los Rios, Arcos de la Frontera-. There is accommodation, many activities for kids and for me is a fantastic place to spend a weekend

Bye bloggers

A different point of view of a grey day!

The photo was taken in Hyde Park (London). They are my friends during the days they came to see me when I used to live in Bristol.

We spent two days in London and the weather was....totally English!!

(There's another grey day photo here.)

a little something for the weekend ....

Hi everybody.,
Here's a quick exercise to follow up from the last lesson. It's the dictation I promised you :)
Just click on play and you'll hear four questions. Write them down and then play again and repeat with me! It should be fun (I hope!).




Then choose one, or two or more of the questions and write answers to them to send each other by email, or post here on the blog.

Oh yes, and if you were there on Wednesday, remember the instructions task with the rods!

I hope you have a great weekend. I'm going away until Wednesday (I'll tell you all about it when I get back!). I'll be back on the blog then with an online lesson to make up for the one we're missing next week!

See you then.
Have fun,
Ceri

Mercedes' Fotobabble

Playing around with fotobabble

Hi, here's my first attempt at using fotobabble. I had to use a picture from the webcam as all my other photos are too big.  I hope you can hear it!



Here's a tip - if you want to add a fotobabble too - just paste in the code from "embed your fotobabble" - you can adjust the size by changing the numbers after width and height in the code - at the beginning and at the end of the code - like this - width="420" height="350".

Good luck!

Lesson follow up November 24

Hi everybody!
Just a quick message, to check that the email alerts are working - and to suggest a couple of tasks for the next week.

But first of all, thank you Montse for last lesson's summary. I've added it to the lesson summaries for November, and thank you Mercedes for offering to write the summary for today!

Ok, back to the tasks.

Do you remember we visited another class blog in Seville and we saw that they had posted some photos with their own commentary?  Well one of the tasks could be to visit the fotobabble website and see if you can add a speaking photo to our blog. I'm going to try it out too!  Another task could be to visit lodelaingli and add a comment to their adverb poem. Do you remember it?  It made me smile.

I'm going to send you notes and exercises on using "the" with the names of places in an email, it's easier than posting it here, but maybe you'd like to write about somewhere you've visited recently, remembering to be careful with how and when you use the.   If you could add a photo of where you've been as well, that would be great.

And finally, here's a photo to remind you of the exercise we did to finish the lesson.

Can you remember the eight idiomatic expressions we looked at using as ... as... ?  Don't use your notes!  Just look at the rods and see if they come back to you :)

Here are a few more I like:

as quiet as a mouse
not as young as I used to be
as happy as a pig in muck 

Try searching for some more on Google and let us know what you find!
Ok, that's all from me. Over to you!
Please add lots of comments and if you're having any problems blogging, just let me know and I'll try to help!

Lesson 12: Have you got a rainy day photo to share?

Hello everyone!

I like taking photos on cloudy days. I love those days plenty of clouds, with the sunshine breaking through the gaps. I usually take my camera and my dog and go for a walk to the beach or any of paths in the salt marsh in the bay of Cadiz.

When I saw your photo, I remembered the most beautiful rainbow I've ever seen. It was on La Gomera island, my husband and I spent Christmas there in 2004.

We love going hiking and La Gomera is a great place to hike, since it has a network of paths crossing all over the island, through a wide variety of landscapes. We left early in the morning, walked for about 6 hours and came back to the house in the evening, we were exhausted but very happy.

We saw this double rainbow almost at the end of our ramble. After walking some hours under a light drizzle, the sky suddenly lit up and the rainbow unexpectedly appeared. It was absolutely breathtaking.

Bye for now,
Mercedes

Lesson 12 November 17

Hi everybody!
Thanks for a great lesson again today - despite the grey skies ;)
Here's a photo I found from another grey day in Cádiz. It's the view from our flat. It was amazing to see the rainbow with the storm on one side and the blue skies starting to show on the other. In fact, if you look really closely you may be able to see a double rainbow.  I love days like these, especially when there are storms coming in from the sea.  I think they're really energising  - and they remind me of home ;)  Mind you I think I only like them because they're few and far between, and I do prefer beautiful blue skies like the ones we had today!

Have you got a rainy day photo to share?  You can add it in here, or send it to me by email and I'll add it in.  Remember to tell us something about it, where you took it, when and why.

Other possible tasks from today's class:

• write the story of the private investigator and the woman he was following - what happened after she turned the corner?  
• tell us how you feel about grey days, where you like to be and what you like to do
• take a look at the aerial shots on this website Earth from the Air (I'm sure you know the photographer, Yann Arthus.Bertrand, his photos are everywhere!) - choose one you like and tell us why you like it - we'll look at them together in the next class. 

You can add your texts here in this post, add a new post, or write them in a comment. If you're having any problems, send me an email and I'll try to help!   Or if you prefer, send them to me by email, just as we always do, and when you think your post is ready, we can add it to the blog.

Right, that's all from me.
Hope you have a great weekend!
Ceri 

from our classroom!

I´m Isabel,I´m an unemployed economist and I wanna learn to speak English as well as Ceri and find a good job only in the mornings.

I'm Montse and I'm from Cadiz. English is very necessary for me and this tool is one, that I'm really sure, will be useful for all of us to improve our English.
That's all thanks of Ceri.
Let's go to take part!!

I'm Fernando, like Isabel I'm an unemployed economist and I want to learn lots of English. I join in a new way to learn English with an interactive board and new technologies. This blog is an interesting tool in learning English, enjoy it!

I'm Mercedes, I love Ceri's classes. I hope you enjoy our classes as well.

I´m Paco, I´m from San Fernando (Cádiz). I studied nursing and I´m self-employed and work for private companies. Now I am studing English language (for hobbie, for travel for the (my) future) and Anthropology too. I work as a volunteer for the Spanish Red Cross but sometimes I´m also employee.

Lesson 11 - November 3

Hi!

Thanks again, Mercedes, for a great lesson summary. I'm going to copy all the past lesson summaries onto our blog so we have them all in one place.

In the meantime, here are a couple of images to remind you of what we talked about last week.

This is a view from the rooftop terrace at Torre Tavira. We talked about the camera obscura and all the watch towers - 126 I think we said there were - where merchants (or more likely their servants) stood and watched their ships come in.




And here's a link to the trailer we failed to watch for the new Danny Boyle film, 127 hours. I emailed the link last week. Maybe you've already watched it. If not, why not watch it now?
I loved his last film, Slumdog Millionaire, but I'm not sure about this one.




So, do you think you'd you like to see the film? I'm not convinced I would. A bit too dramatic for my tastes, but it's a great story!

Hi everybody!

This is our new blog. I hope you like it!

It's a space for all of us to write, comment, add links and share whatever we want to share. I'll set our first blogging task in the email after today's lesson.