A REAL BARGAIN is an amusing unit on the PASSIVE TENSE taken from Streamline English Departures (Hartley & Viney, OUP 1983) – my absolute favourite not only for teaching the passive tense but particulary for imparting a culture lesson on Houses in Great Britain. With its beautiful illustrations, rich housing vocabulary and amusing content – it makes a fun lesson on British culture. I usually ask students to read the text taking turns to be the Estate Agent and Mr. Palmer, the prospective buyer, stopping after each paragraph to explain the vocabulary and the passive tense as it develops:
As they read the story I ask very easy listening comprehension questions, paragraph by paragraph, which they do not have so they have to understand them and reread the paragraph to reply. I only explain the vocabulary and cultural habits we have as the story enfolds since I do not want to spoil the amusing ending to the story. Since I believe in full-immersion, I do not translate the vocabulary but define and illustrate on the board. This is also an opportunity for students to compare their homes and cultural housing traditions to the British ones – an opportunity for class discussion. VOCABULARY Estate Agent semi-detached house detached house cottage bungalow block of flats terraced house town house owners roof tiled roof thatched roof flat roof electrical wiring rewired redecorated (wallpaper is very common) wallpaper repainted central heating (as opposed to the old fireplace with the mantelpiece) brick stone services: - dustbins emptied - post delivered - milk delivered (the milkman with his silent electric van early in the morning) motorway It was only when a friend of mine came to visit my home in Italy that he opened my eyes to differences I had never considered: “Wow! You have real marble windowsills!” – British windowsills are made of wood which need to be constantly repainted to stop them from rotting. “You have beautiful wooden doors!” British doors are usually just painted over. “Your floors are solid marble or parquet!” British floors are loose floorboards with some kind of covering: carpet, lino… Any other main differences your students may have noticed watching films? Mine pointed out that in the USA and GB the kitchen sink is always in front of a window – true but I had never noticed. You can download the materials below. I hope you find this activity as useful and enjoyable as I do. Susan
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The INTERRUPTION GAME: bombarding a classmate with questions – a fast and engaging speaking activity7/2/2016 The INTERRUPTION GAME: a fast, fun, highly effective and exciting no-prep speaking activity which engages all the class against one student.
Set your timer at 5 minutes. Choose a student to tell us their typical day from the moment they wake up till the moment they turn off the light to sleep. His aim is to get to the end of the day having given a very detailed account filling all the five minutes (no less – no more). The aim of the rest of the class is to stop him from getting to the end of his day by interrupting him with pertinent details regarding what he is saying:
The teacher listens and makes a note on the board of wrong questions or answers, which are only subsequently corrected altogether by the class guided by the teacher. I read about this activity in a blog about a year ago but cannot remember who to credit for it. In any case students tend to love it and participate eagerly with the consequential benefit of practice and learning. I hope you have fun with this activity. Susan There are teachers who feed information to students whether they like it or not and there are others who teach students to think – the latter are inevitably the best because they not only capture their students’ full attention but leave life-long learning lessons which go way beyond the subject they were teaching. Cattywampus is the story of such a teacher and I use it to practise reading this short piece aloud in class, verify vocabulary comprehension (see below) and get the students to tell us their own Cattywampus stories which we have to decide whether to believe or not. This activity is incredibly engaging for students (which we do in pairs) and the teacher has to inevitably go round helping with vocabulary to express their ideas. If you have an Interactive White Board you can READ IT ONLINE THROUGH LINGRO.COM to get vocabulary explanations: http://cbse-ncert-homework-help.blogspot.it/2013/09/best-teacher-i-ever-had-by-david-owen.html:
Once you have read the story ask students to answer the questions below the text to tell each other a story: what’s your opinion? Is it a Cattywampus? You can download the STORY with QUESTIONS below. I hope you have fun with this activity. Susan
Traditions are the glue which hold society together – we may have different opinions, political views, different religions and awkward characters but our common traditions keep us together. December and January in my family are also the birthday months of my children (24th December for my daughter / 24th January for my son) and I have always followed British birthday party traditions despite living abroad. Moving from country to country I realized that even simple, apparently less important celebrations such as birthday parties for children and youngsters differ greatly. We, in Great Britain, have quite traditional activities for younger children at birthday parties while organizing a party for teenagers that is fun can be quite demanding. I realized that a BIRTHDAY LESSON Plan can give insight into lesser British traditions and at the same time many Birthday Party Games can be adapted for learning languages as well. So how do children under the age of 10 celebrate a typical home birthday party? For those families who do not want to or cannot spend money on hiring an entertainer or magician, for those who prefer not to go to a ‘bouncy castle’ park or other location for birthday events outside the home, there are fun traditional games which do involve adult organization but make a birthday a special play date – different from when friends just come over to play (I discovered that in Italy children just play freely making it no different from any other occasion and due to the higher number of guests than normal, mayhem usually occurs.) When the young guests arrive the presents are all collected on a low table and the children sit neatly in a circle while the birthday child opens the presents one by one, admiring and thanking as he goes. Then it is time for the traditional organized games (this is where I had great difficulty convincing Italian children that they had to participate in the games I organized and not just play around as they liked).
There are many other traditional games as well as new technological ones but the important thing is for the children to interact all together at the party and not break up into small groups. Obviously the party ends with lots of finger food (small sandwiches, fairy cakes, crisps) and of course the astonishingly shaped* home-made birthday cake with traditional song and blowing of candles. (For lessons make sure they pronounce HAPPY BIRTHDAY correctly by ‘spitting’ the ‘TH’ sound like in the ordinal numbers (10th) and not making it a soft sound like in mother.). In Great Britain it is customary for the birthday child to give small ‘going home presents’ to the guests as they leave (which are inexpensive tokens of gratitude). What about those aged 10 upwards – how do they celebrate a typical birthday party? A theme is very often chosen. For my son’s 10th birthday party I organized a surprise ‘flight’ to a mystery destination. Everything from the ‘flight ticket invitations’, to the airport check-in on arrival and the ‘flight’ by car to the mystery destination, which was a tiny light aircraft local airport for a guided tour of the two-seater planes and how they worked. The airplane shaped cake and the History of Flight video ended the party for my airplane crazy son who is now 18 and already training for his second pilot licence. For my daughter 10th birthday in December the theme was a spy training camp for which I started sending out mystery invitations to decode every week starting in October and no one (not even my own children) knew where they came from. It all ended on the day of the party with lots of spy gadgets and fun from finger prints to shooting pop guns and working out how to unlock the treasure chests with a mystery code. Birthday parties are a big event in our tradition even for teenagers where the treasure hunt can be at the town mall picking up the unexpected presents from shop to shop on the way… How do you celebrate birthday parties where you live? Please leave comments below in a wonderful exchange… I hope you have fun with these traditional birthday party activites. Susan
http://www.appliancesonlineblog.com.au/cooking/why-the-womens-weekly-childrens-birthday-cake-book-is-the-best-cookbook-ever-written/
The last few days before Christmas are marked by LOW CONCENTRATION and HIGH EXCITEMENT built up by all the pre-Christmas activities and the tiring end of the year. I usually reserve these following activities for just this last period and it always captures the students attention.
You can download the links to these activities below. I hope you have fun with these last-minute Christmas activites. Susan
Adults and children alike tend to sing songs often without thinking of their meaning. Christmas is a time for singing and I have broken down a Christmas song for teens and adults, Happy Christmas, as well as one for children, Rudolph, to practise adjectives and expressions. I start by singing the song, we then personalize the main sentences (see my sheets) to make them more meaningful for the students who will hopefully not only remember the new words and expressions repeating them in song but will also have fun doing so. You can download my sheets below. Feel free to delete or translate the Italian into another language. I hope you find the activity useful and enjoyable. Susan
Christmas adverts can be stimulating to use in class for language learning. This particular one is very rich in details so one can use it for vocabulary acquisition. Apart from asking the very specific questions on the sheets, I often expand by asking students to predict was is going to happen next as well as recounting what has just happened. A vocabulary rich Christmas activity to do in class or even autonomously at home: stop the video numerous times following the indications given and enjoy describing all the details of the kitchen in this fun disastrous Christmas with Mog, the cat. Excellent for revising and learning new vocabulary in the kitchen! Enjoy! You can download the sheets below. I hope you find the activity useful and enjoyable. Susan
A Christmas classic in two pages to practise scanning and listening comprehension skills is another way of approaching Dickens and acquiring exam skills. I summarized the story to be done in a one-hour lesson so as not to be too tedious and give a sense of completion. I first hand out the story (see download) or project it on the whiteboard and whilst I’m doing so they can skim it but most students already know the story from films or cartoons if they haven’t already read it. I divide the class into teams A and B. I then ask them questions on the text without the students being able to read them and the first person to find the answer in the text gets a point for their team. They have to read out the complete sentence to answer. This activity gives them listening, scanning, reading and pronunciation practice. It's more fun than just reading the story. There is also a GAP-FILL for homework but one has to first collect in the photocopies with the complete story on it. The competitive element makes it an exciting activity even for those participants who would normally be easily bored by reading a story. To encourage weaker or less collaborative students (I’m thinking of some teens) I sometimes nominate those students to receive 2 or 3 points each for their team, making sure there are an equal number of ‘specially nominated’ students in each team so as to be fair. You can download my three sheets below. I hope you find the activity useful and enjoyable. Susan
As the festive season nears it's nice to do language activities in the Christmas spirit even if our students come from a multicultural background or are atheist. I feel it should be seen by all participants in class not so much as a religious moment solely for Christians (the Church is the appropriate place for that) but as an opportunity to exchange cultural and religious traditions from all over the world. So,whilst I explain to students how the Christmas season is celebrated in Great Britain, I also take the opportunity to ask students of other faiths and non to tell us about their greatest celebrations during the year. It's very interesting to hear about other religious traditions and a moment of sharing. Just as interesting is to discover that many families in far off countries celebrate Christmas despite not being Christian as a day for families to reunite, spend time together and exchange presents. So, apart from singing traditional carols, modern Christmas songs and enacting the Nativity, students enjoy any language activity in a new festive season motif. An activity I read about a couple of years ago but cannot remember the source (please let me know if you recognise who invented this activity) is: GUESS WHAT'S INSIDE THE CHRISTMAS STOCKING! I adapted it into two versions: one stocking for beginners with a PDF of suggestions as to the contents (objects for children & teens) and another stocking for adults with just a few prompts on the language of speculation: It could be... It might be... It can't be.... I thinks it's... It must be made of... It rattles so... etc. This seemingly simple activity causes much speculation amongst participants young and old, keeping them fully concentrated and engaged for more than half an hour, feeling the shape and consistency of the objects through the stocking, trying to guess the materials they are made of as well. At the end the stocking is opened and the objects revealed! A fun, exciting and useful activity for all ages, learning to discuss what things look, feel like and are made of. You can download my two sheets and the audio for beginners. Hope you have fun with them, Susan
Preschoolers (and younger Primary School children) love singing to movements. I invented this Preschool Nativity Play Song to act out the Nativity so as to learn not only the story but also a lot of vocabulary as well. We usually do it altogether, assigning just the main roles to a few but everyone else joining in at the same time. The more dramatic the movements, the more meaningful and fun: father’s long long beard reaches the ground (pulling it from our chins), we put our hands up on our heads to imitate the donkey’s long long ears, and so on … Depending on the size of the group we sometimes improvise costumes as well, or one of the bigger children as a donkey – we often make crowns for the Wise Men and a few ‘presents’ before starting the song. Anything to make it fun and memorable. I am posting it well ahead of time because some teachers like to do it as a one-off activity whilst others like to practise it for an upcoming Christmas show. Either way, you can download the NATIVITY SONG and suggested tune in the audio below. Hope the children enjoy it! Susan
GETTING STUDENTS INVOLVED IN LESSON PREPARATION will make the CONTENTS MORE MEMORABLE... Previous to the digital era I had dedicated many days to preparing a large set of Happy Families cards based on vocabulary sets: cutting out pictures from magazines, writing in beautiful handwriting in different colours, covering the cards back and front with transparent sticky film - no laminating in those days. After much fun play in class, my bag of carefully homemade teaching resources was stolen from my car together with my old school uniform, I kept to show my students. So I lost all motivation to create a new set. Recently, however, I felt the need for that very useful game and realized that in the digital age it would be much easier to recreate. I suddenly realized how well it would also work with verbs and am now in the process of making a pack of cards for verbs and another for vocabulary which I shall share in due course. Not having any cards ready, yesterday I decided to involve my preschool group in creating three simple sets and explaining the rules at the same time. THE GAME WAS A HUGE SUCCESS because, HAVING PARTICIPATED IN ITS CREATION, it was EASIER TO REMEMBER THE VOCABULARY and WORDS. As a result I have decided I will involve my younger children in lesson preparation more often in order to make learning more memorable for them. For those who don’t know how to play HAPPY FAMILIES:
You can download the game below. I shall share the new ones I make in due course (more elaborate including tense changes). Hope you have fun with it! Susan P.S. Someone rightly noticed that I wrote 'do' climbing instead of 'go'. This was because the little girl who suggested it to me 'does' climbing on a wall in a local gym and on the spur of the moment I considered it equivalent to what gymnasts 'do'. I will make sure I put it with 'go' on the new cards I make because it is effectively and outdoor sport.
The PRESENT SIMPLE contrasted with the PRESENT CONTINUOUS can be practiced easily with a fun game of ludo. I find that it is a recurrent problem which needs lots of practice. I usually draw a winding ludo board on the blackboard but you can also project the gameboard I have to download on the IWB or else even print a copy for a group of students to play on. I like to first revise the grammatical differences before dividing the class into two teams and getting them to throw the dice. Each team in turn answers the question according to the number they land on (having previously handed out the photocopied questions to them). If they answer correctly they can stay on the square where they just landed. If they make a mistake they go back to the previous square they were on. The first team to reach the FINISH is obviously the winner. The game is not at all as easy as it seems and sometimes two answers could be possible depending on interpretation. However, due to its challenging nature it is fun as well as being effective. You can download the game below. Hope you have fun with it! Susan P.S. I forgot to mention that because there are only 55 questions but 60 balls on the board, you then restart from the beginning and number 56 is equivalent to question 1, 57 = question 2, 58 = question 3, 59 = question 4 and 60 = question 5. This is to repeat the trickier questions at the beginning which sometimes lead students to give the wrong answer. The blue balls can be used or not - as you please. You could allow those landing on a blue ball to throw the dice again for example.
Repetitive NURSERY RHYMES with their easy rhythmic tunes and well-known NURSERY TALES lend themselves to SINGING and ACTING: two activities which children love doing!! Many years ago I ADAPTED three NURSERY TALES in increasing difficulty to RECYCLE the most important LANGUAGE we had learnt during the school year. Children loved it and parents enjoyed watching their children's progress. HAVING FUN was another key element to making sure they learnt EXPRESSIONS IN A MEANINGFUL CONTEXT. NURSERY RHYMES can also be ACTED OUT whilst they are being SUNG to consolidate their meaning and enable children to pronounce somewhat complicated sentences to PAVE THEIR WAY TO FLUENCY... CINDERELLA is the third and last in order of difficulty of the three to download with the pronunciation guide as well to help children practise alone at home. (See previous posts dated 9th July 2015 for the easier LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD or the medium difficulty GOLDILOCKS dated 31st August 2015). In those days children had no other way of practising autonomously. Nowadays I prefer to RECORD AUDIOS of the pronunciations for them TO LISTEN TO REPEATEDLY all collected in a Dropbox folder for easy access. Try these out! Hope you have fun with it! Susan
Children will listen in awe if you read them a captivating story using plenty of expression! The illustrations help comprehension even though I must admit that when I read a story to young learners of English, I read and translate it orally sentence by sentence as I’m going along – recording it for them to listen to again and again. This exception to my rule of never translating is to incentivate children to be patient and hear the story out until the end. Some of the children I teach are still toddlers and until about the age of 10 I feel they need this support. I try to explain the meaning from age 11 upwards rather than translating. In today’s age of technology where everything is ‘consumed’ at full speed or immediately abandoned at the first waning of interest, books start losing their appeal early on in life and so people miss out on so much in the wonderful world of books where your imagination may wander…. Translating for younger children also allows us to enjoy a little more complicated stories rather than limiting ourselves to the few simpler books.
Children’s books have the most wonderful illustrations and so, occasionally, I take a picture and separate the different parts of it together with my students so we can describe the individual details and appreciate their artistic beauty. My students love them. I then laminate these individual parts of the picture and we play games with them to learn the vocabulary and expressions. The most popular and effective game for learning the vocabulary and expressions is ‘Snap’, whereby I say each word or expression as they turn the cards to connect the visual aid with the sound of the word for the younger ones and to teach the pronunciation of the written word to the older ones. After a few games I try to get them to say the words instead. This activity of looking at the illustrations in detail proves to be very popular with my students who then enjoy looking at the details in the illustrations of their own reading books at home. Hope you like this idea! Susan
Many certifications, beginning with the Cambridge English: Young Learners STARTERS /MOVERS / FLYERS exams for primary school children, require students to describe pictures in varying detail depending on their level and to understand listening pieces in order to carry out tasks demonstrating their comprehension. Therefore practising these skills intensely together will give the students the confidence to face these exams from a very young age.
I have tried describing these pictures with chants where I sing a piece and they repeat it like an echo. To make it more fun I have them search for what we are singing and see if they can find it before their friends. This makes them not only practise fluency but also verify their comprehension.
Subsequently – when the chant has been repeated numerous times over a period of time (a few days) – students can be asked to describe the picture with their own words. Inevitably they will use the right collocations and vocabulary. For older students one might try making a gap-fill with the text to see if they remember the right prepositions or collocations. For this purpose I am also adding the Word document to modify as you feel necessary. Children could, in groups, describe one aspect of another picture and then all the class puts the various sentences together into a chant to sing together. All the materials and audio are provided below for you to download. If you have any other ideas of how one could exploit the materials please comment below. Hope you have fun using them! Susan
Children and youngsters thrive when there is structure in their life: so starting and ending lessons in a familiar way rounds them off. Particularly at the beginning of the school year and for various months following I like to start off lessons with songs and chants which introduce and revise the date, weather, time and seasons. These introductory chants are not only meant to be sung repetitively but are meant to introduce the various topics: when we speak of the date we possibly look for and stick up the corresponding day, date and month on the board. (I have laminated sticky-backed ‘signs’ to substitute day by day – see picture). As for the weather, once we have imitated the various kinds of weather with gestures during the chant, I have various cards which they can in turn hold up asking their friends, “Is it sunny?”, “No, it’s not / Yes, it is,” until they can also stick the appropriate weather card on the board. We practise saying different times and seasons according to whim and so all these activities consolidate their knowledge of dates, cardinal and ordinal numbers, years and times – numbers in a foreign language being a notable hurdle even for adults. The end of the lesson is usually rounded off singing a few expressions to tidy up and wish a nice time until our next appointment. These are useful expressions which can also be used in everyday life. So below you have the scripts and audios to all these chants to download. Hope you have fun using them! Susan
PLAYING WITH CARDS to FORM SENTENCES makes language learning MUCH MORE FUN and CONSOLIDATES THE STRUCTURES. It's the beginning of the school year and many students are struggling to concentrate after a summer of fun so games like this can get them to FOCUS ON GRAMMAR and interiorize it whilst HAVING FUN! It takes a little preparation but you can also try getting students to help out with the cutting and sorting into categories - they seem to enjoy it whilst practising new vocabulary such as 'cut it out', 'put it over there', 'put it on that pile'. You can download the cards below. Let me know how you get along with it! Hope you have fun with it! Susan
ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS: Try teaching and LEARNING GRAMMAR with fun repetitive songs - my experience is that even beginners can learn more complicated grammatical structures when they are used repetitively in a song. I added some prepositions and collocations to my originally simpler song. Try it out for yourselves - you'll be surprised!! You can download the song below: Have fun with it and learn! Susan
An AMAZING interactive app! I, who have never been lured into spending money on an app until today (4.99 euro), was looking for something on the internet about the world to propose as an activity to the children at my summercamp a few weeks ago. Our summer theme was 'travelling around the world" and by chance I came across the video explaining how children can spin a 3D globe with their fingers and enlarge any area they are attracted to by the myriad of little colourful animated hand-painted icons (buildings, animals, plants, people), clicking on them, reading and listening to an explanation about them, seeing a real photo of them, listening to sounds and music pertaining to them, in an all-round experience. I was mesmerised and bought it there and then sitting in bed with my iPad at 3am. The next day I could not stop the curiosity of the children aged 5 - 12, as I projected the globe on the screen - I had their full attention - all of them - calling to me to stop and click this or that icon: and best of all, expressing themselves in broken English without even realising it: "Look at that!" "Wow, a lovely animal!" "Stop, stop! Go back! Click on that orco!" - a killer whale I would suggest... "Can I click, please?", "Listen!" - there was no stopping them and snack-time arrived an hour later without us realising it! Admittedly for such a wide range of ages the short texts and accompanying audios were too much but we just described colours and admired the beauty of it all. Some remembered where they had travelled and others told us what they knew about the animals. The way it aroused curiosity made me realise its potential in class and I have already experimented it in very small groups. Depending on the level of the students, they can read, or read and listen or only listen to the short accompanying texts, learning new vocabulary and expressions. Older students can talk about what they know on the subject and small projects can be done for homework. I introduced it to a few toddler mums whose children loved it and called me to have the link. I have no connections whatsoever to this company and have never read any of their books so they are totally new to me but this app offers language potential in a very educational context which is highly attractive to children of all ages - their curiosity gets the better of them and one can exploit it in many ways - getting them to express themselves in English whilst excitedly exploring the world and its cultures. The app is called: Barefoot Books WORLD ATLAS written by Nick Crane and illustrated by David Dean, produced in collaboration with the Royal Geographic Society. I recommend you watch the video demonstrating it: This second video shows its potential for children to physically put into practice what they learn from the atlas in play - a roleplay situation to be encouraged for language learning as well: Looking forward to hearing any of your ideas on how to use it! Susan "I spy with my little eye something beginning with B." said the little boy to his sister while I was sunbathing on holiday by the pool, "It's blue and it's behind the sun-lounger... no... next to mum's sunglasses... no... between her hat and the suntan lotion... yes, it's her Book!! Good girl! Now it's your turn...". My eyes shot open! WHAT A WONDERFUL WAY TO REVISE VOCABULARY AND PREPOSITIONS!! I suddenly realised how SIMPLE CHILDREN'S GAMES can be used in the classroom FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING. I racked my brain for other long-forgotten childhood games but momentarily could come up with nothing useful except NURSERY RHYMES which I never use enough: irregular verbs in the past & present perfect, the future, vocabulary, phrasal verbs... children love acting them out and they are so easy to remember and repeat with their rhyming words - the definitely PROMOTE FLUENCY! I would welcome any other simple games you would like to suggest to me! Looking forward to hearing any of your ideas! Susan My summercamp was nearing the end and I was running out of ideas. Then I saw Buddy in a photo with his friend Juan Alberto Lopez Uribe and all the wonderful activities they had done at Gallery Day Camp in Varese, Italy. I contacted Juan for advice and he reminded me of things I had done with my children in days-gone-by - PUPPET-MAKING - plus he gave me an excellent tip: use a hot glue gun!
What amazed me more than their creativity (I made a puppet there and then out of an old sock as an example) was how they started making their puppets talk spontaneously to each other without my prompting them. Even the shyest students crept out of their shells (mine were aged 3 - 12) and spontaneously improvised little dialogues with each other. I presume they felt free to express themselves through the puppet thereby having no fear of making mistakes or being judged - it was the puppet speaking and not them. A really fun and linguistically productive activity: during puppet-making I ensured they used imperatives such as "Pass me the scissors, please!" after which they enjoyed "chatting" to each other via the puppets. Thank you to Juan for all your advice!! Check out Juan's link to his videos: http://childrenlearningenglishaffectively.blogspot.it/2011/10/funtastic-world-of-puppets.html?m=1 Try it out and have fun! Susan Before having children all my free time was dedicated to globetrotting and I had started writing a book about my travels.
I have always found writing about my personal experiences easier than writing about an imaginary situation which I have never been through. I therefore usually encourage people to base their writing work on something familiar to them and then adapt it to the written assignment making changes where necessary and enriching with adjectives and our imagination. This third post regarding some of my adventures is not only to encourage students to do likewise, thus practising their writing, but to stimulate people into class discussion on the topics students have written about and shared. Many of those stories are outdated as times change, countries develop... Should anyone like to comment & let me know how things have changed since I visited these countries, it would be welcome feedback. A WEARY TRAVELLER'S TALES Tragicomic Episodes from a Globe-Trotter's Diary As a young, well-travelled globe-trotter, I prefer visiting countries in order to get to know the people, their customs and traditions, rather than only seeing the sights from an air-conditioned bus after having left an anonymous first-class hotel. On my travels I have come across many tragicomic episodes worth recounting, which are not only amusing in themselves but offer a great insight into the ways and being of different peoples in far off countries. The best way to appreciate other mentalities and ways of life is to try and integrate oneself with the people by travelling with local forms of transport, eating in local restaurants and sleeping in hotels where one can mix with the locals rather than with tourists. CHINA Part 1 (written in 1987): Whichever form of transport one chooses in China, it is always an adventure. Trains for the foreigner seem to be the most exciting. The communications system is extremely poor so that one can only make seat/couchette reservations at least six days in advance and only from the original station of departure. If you happen to be travelling through the country and stopping off to visit towns for less than six days, as was my case, you can forget trying to make a reservation. Reservations cannot be made when boarding at intermediate stations, since they have no way of knowing which seat/couchettes were booked from the original station of departure. The only hope is to try once on the train. One of our longest train journeys started in Xian, where one can see the famous terracotta army. We managed to book two 'hard seats' (the other class is 'soft seats') and they turned out to be as hard as ever, with very straight backrests. Actually, it was quite interesting to see that once seated, everyone took out a little towel and hung it on a hook above their seats. I later discovered this served to wipe down the continuous streams of sweat that are inevitable in the summer heat despite the numerous fans (which for some reason work when there is the breeze caused by the train speeding along, but do not work when the trains stop at the stations, so that the heat is even more stifling). The next ritual for each passenger was to put a tin cup with lid on the little table jutting out between the facing seats. Into these they added a few tea leaves. Moments after the train left an attendant passed by filling the cups with boiling water from a giant kettle, kept warm on a fire burning between carriages. Thus began our scheduled five hour night journey to Luoyang, where we were to visit the Longmen Caves. Not having found room in the couchettes, we spent the night sharing our two reserved 'hard seats' with another two Chinese who managed to squeeze in, one of whom fell asleep with his head nodding on my shoulder. Eight sleepless hours later we got off at our destination. Having spent the day visiting Luoyang's sights, we bought our onward journey tickets to Beijing. No kind of reservation at all, of course, since this was an intermediate stop and reservations could only be made at Xian. The train was due to leave at 7.30 p.m. but on showing our tickets, we were told that the train was twelve hours late! Considering that Xian is officially five hours journey away, this seemed to be quite a record! We decided to catch the next train which brought us to Zengzhou, on the junction with the Beijing line. Whether this was unacceptable because the Chinese only catch direct trains, or because our tickets were only valid for the direct train was never clear to us. However, amongst heavy protest from the station attendants we boarded the train. At 11.30 p.m. we were at Zengzhou. According to our interpretation of the all-Chinese timetable, the next train to Beijing left at midnight. We lined up to have our tickets amended. After much incomprehension, obviously because what we were doing was not usual, our tickets were updated and we were accompanied to the waiting room area reserved for those leaving on the 6.00 a.m. train. We therefore settled down to our second sleepless night, hoping to steal a few hours nap by resting against each other. Impossible! A uniformed guard walked through the waiting room every half hour and violently shook awake anyone even vaguely dozing. There may have been a "No Dozing!" sign on the wall, but to us illiterate in the Chinese language, it was certainly not apparent. The journey to Beijing was no more eventful than any other that has been spent sitting on a train floor for ten consecutive hours in sweltering heat. However, it was fascinating watching with what dexterity small children were able to manoeuvre their chopsticks whilst eating on a jolting train. Unfortunately the hygienic advantages of modern packaging meant that all polystyrene lunch boxes were automatically thrown from the window of the moving train, littering the still medieval looking Chinese countryside. Subsequent shorter train journeys acquainted us with interesting games that the Chinese love to play. But however clean we all were when we boarded, on arrival our clothes were all a grubby grey, not to mention the dirt under our finger nails. It was only after quite a few trips that we realised this filth was due to the fact that the trains are all run on coal, leaving a sooty trail. For someone born in the electric/diesel train era, this was quite a revelation. * * * CHINA to be continued .... next episode coming soon! Have you ever had any tragi-comic experiences? Susan Repetitive NURSERY RHYMES with their easy rhythmic tunes and well-known NURSERY TALES lend themselves to SINGING and ACTING: two activities which children love doing!! Many years ago I ADAPTED three NURSERY TALES in increasing difficulty to RECYCLE the most important LANGUAGE we had learnt during the school year. Children loved it and parents enjoyed watching their children's progress. HAVING FUN was another key element to making sure they learnt EXPRESSIONS IN A MEANINGFUL CONTEXT. NURSERY RHYMES can also be ACTED OUT whilst they are being SUNG to consolidate their meaning and enable children to pronounce somewhat complicated sentences to PAVE THEIR WAY TO FLUENCY... GOLDILOCKS is the second in order of difficulty of the three to download with the pronunciation guide as well to help children practise alone at home. (See previous post dated 9th July 2015 for the easier LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD). In those days children had no other way of practising autonomously. Nowadays I prefer to RECORD AUDIOS of the pronunciations for them TO LISTEN TO REPEATEDLY all collected in a Dropbox folder for easy access. Try these out! Hope you have fun with it! Susan
Many language students tend to dedicate a long time studying rules and doing written exercises yet not many manage to apply them in spontaneous conversation. Despite exposure to texts and listening activities, unless they practise speaking intensively few are talented enough to be able to express themselves orally without sounding unnatural. For this reason I am trying to create useful songs and chants which incorporate repeating collocations, prepositions, phrasal verbs combined with movements to allow students to embed and practise their oral expression in a fun way and lasting manner without feeling bored or embarassed. I believe in 'learning by doing' and practising speaking can never be enough! The following song is about a pupil's DAILY ROUTINE: Download the VIDEO below to see the movements connected to the EXPRESSIONS in the simple song! (Unfortunately I could not upload the Video with subtitles due to 34MB size - I will gladly email it to you on request.) Try it out and have fun! Susan
This second post regarding some of my adventures is not only to encourage students to do likewise, thus practising their writing, but to stimulate people into class discussion on the topics students have written about and shared.
I have always found writing about my personal experiences easier than writing about an imaginary situation which I have never been through. I therefore usually encourage people to base their writing work on something familiar to them and then adapt it to the written assignment making changes where necessary and enriching with adjectives and our imagination. Before having children all my free time was dedicated to globetrotting and I had started writing a book about my travels. Many of those stories are outdated as times change, countries develop... Should anyone like to comment & let me know how things have changed since I visited these countries, it would be welcome feedback. A WEARY TRAVELLER'S TALES Tragicomic Episodes from a Globe-Trotter's Diary As a young, well-travelled globe-trotter, I prefer visiting countries in order to get to know the people, their customs and traditions, rather than only seeing the sights from an air-conditioned bus after having left an anonymous first-class hotel. On my travels I have come across many tragicomic episodes worth recounting, which are not only amusing in themselves but offer a great insight into the ways and being of different peoples in far off countries. The best way to appreciate other mentalities and ways of life is to try and integrate oneself with the people by travelling with local forms of transport, eating in local restaurants and sleeping in hotels where one can mix with the locals rather than with tourists. JAPAN (written in 1990): The Japanese are notoriously clean, leaving their street shoes at the front door. For the uninitiated foreigner this means a lot of practice is needed in slipper changing. Japanese Ryokan are small, but homely hotels in true Japanese style. At the entrance one encounters rows of street shoes neatly lined up under the first step which leads inside. On the step are numerous slippers ready to be donned by anyone who wishes to enter. Once inside these slippers are only to be worn in the halls, never in the rooms, which have 'tatami' mat floors on which one walks in socks or barefoot. Just inside the bathroom, whether private or shared, are other slippers. This means that if I leave my room to use the toilet, I must put on my hall slippers and take them off outside the toilet, because the toilet slippers are just inside. And wo betide the tourist who is caught walking around the hall with the toilet slippers he forgot to slip off again!! * * * Precision is another asset of the Japanese and having lived in Germany, I am quite used to it. However, lining up to catch arriving trains in Japan certainly amazed me. If you buy a ticket with a reservation, you need only to look at the numbered signs along the platform. Besides pointing out where your carriage will stop, the markings on the ground tell you exactly where to stand so you will enter the door which is nearest to your seat number. In fact the train halts exactly with its doors parallel to these markings. This is amazing considering the fact that the Shikansen Bullet Train travels at speeds of up to 250km per hour! * * * In a country like Japan, where a large population is concentrated in a small area, getting away from it all can be most difficult. One Sunday we had the brilliant idea of going to Hakone, a famous national park just outside Tokyo, in order to spend a nice relaxing day next to the mountain lake, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mount Fuji peeking from behind the clouds and carrying a bathing costume to wear in one of the thermal pools of the area. At 8.00 a.m. on a Sunday morning Tokyo station was unusually busy with extra stalls set up to sell "bento"s (packed lunches) and families loaded with small rucksacks hurrying to the trains. Once off the Shinkansen train at Odawara station, we lined up to get our onward tickets. A fifteen minute train ride brought us to Yumoto but by the time we got off, our next train was jam packed and we crammed in to stand like sardines for the half hour trip. At Gora a twenty-minute queue allowed us to get tickets for the cog-wheel train in which we actually sat for the very few minutes it took to get to the top, Souzuno. There we queued for another fifteen minutes in order to catch the longest cable car in Asia. The view was impressive and at the first station we stopped off to see some geysers, which were definitely not worth the time we spent waiting to get back on. At the second station we had intended getting off to bathe in the thermal pools but the staff told us we would never get back on, since no empty cars were coming through. At the top, Togendai was where we found our mountain lake but there seemed to be nowhere to relax. We were not able to enjoy the peacefulness we had been looking forward to because the area was just not peaceful. So we lined up to cross the lake on the red and gold painted boat, camouflaged as an old sailing ship and once finally on it, we tried to relax for the forty minutes we stood on the crowded boat. The lake of volcanic origin was extremely beautiful but at that point we were so stressed that we were unable to enjoy it. Not finding anywhere to sit down and relax because the buses were belching black fumes on the lake front, not having even caught a tiny glimpse of Mount Fuji, we decided to take the bus back down and three-quarters of an hour later we were in Yumoto again. On the short train ride to Odawara, we decided to let everyone else rush home to Tokyo whilst we stopped in this calm, uncrowded town of little interest to have a relaxing meal. * * * .... next episode coming soon! Have you ever had any tragi-comic experiences? Susan |
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AuthorMy name is Susan Brodar, born in London into a multilingual family and brought up bilingual English / Italian. Archives
December 2018
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