Thursday, 22 December 2011

We started off this tenth and last session before the break by talking about A Christmas Carol of which you can find the third stave at the bottom of this blog entry. Can you read the text? Do you understand what the story is about? Are there any words you do not understand? The story has 5 chapters or, as Dickens called them, 'staves'. A 'stave' is a song stanza, so the 'carol' or song has 5 stanzas. I will send the Word document of the book, that will also be published here, by e-mail so that you can print out the text. We then finished unit 2 of Let's Talk 3 and we had a look at page 96 of the self-study section. please finish page 97 before our next session on January 12, 2012!

Thursday, 15 December 2011

Again we started the session with asking each other questions using do/does/did + infinitive. We had a talk about what is important in learning English and what are the goals for our conversation group.
We then started unit 2A, activity 1. Activity 2A and 2B are to be prepared at home for next week.
We then talked about A Christmas Carol of which you will find the second installment below. Since most of you have said they prefer reading a printed version, I will convert the text into a printable Word version. In the coming weeks, during our Christmas break, I will publish the rest of the online installments at this blog.

Thursday, 8 December 2011

We began with asking questions and making negative sentences. In most cases you have to use two verbs to do so. For questions use do/does/did + infinitive and for negations use don't/doesn't/didn't + infinitive. For example: Do you celebrate Sinterklaas? No, we don't exchange presents on December 5. Did you see Nova Zembla? No, we didn't know it's in the cinema.
We then finished unit 2A and we had a look at The cat that walked by himself and its exercises.

To get into the Christmas spirit we are going to read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I will publish a retold, simplified version in five 'staves' or installments. Although simplified, it is not a simple text but try to get the gist of the story. There are many films made about Scrooge so you will most probably have heard about it. Click on the window below to expand the text. Scroll down to read.

As a bonus, here's Scrooge from the film The Muppet Christmas Carol. Click on 'show more' to read along with the lyrics of the song.

Thursday, 1 December 2011

After a short discussion of our past week, we continued with let's Talk 3, unit 2A. The last bit of this unit will be dealt with next week. make sure that you are prepared. I then handed out Rudyard kipling's poem poem The cat that walked by himself and we briefly read it. At home you can listen to it here Click on the 'play' button. Practice the pronunciation of the words and lines by listening to them and then repeating them. You can also do the exercises online but we will certainly discuss them in our next session.

Thursday, 24 November 2011

We started off again by sharing what happened last week or what plans you might have for the near future. Any parties, holidays, events, appointments? How did or will these make you feel? Happy, sad, worried, stressed, excited, upset, peaceful?
After this little warming up exercise we continued our book with unit 2A How do you feel? and by having a look at the homework in the self-study section.
We ended the evening by completing silly jokes on a hand out. For more silly jokes, look here.

Thursday, 17 November 2011

We asked our group member who was absent last week, how his week was. We then had a look at the assignments with the video of November 3, Getting Acquainted (see below) and we finished unit 1 by finally having a look at the self-study section. Next week we will start the new module. We also took up doing word search puzzles again.
We ended the session with telling somewhat 'blue' jokes but unfortunately they were not exchanged in English. :)

Thursday, 10 November 2011

The first proper Autumn week although it's still quite warm outside. As usual we started of our session with some talk about last week by asking each other questions. We spent quite some time on this.
I then handed out the vocabulary lists to Let's Talk 3, unit 1, Getting Acquainted. It can also be found here. You can import this list, and the other Let's Talk vocabulary lists I created before, to your own account at wrts. Once imported you can add your own words and use the 'extra' option to listen to the correct pronunciation. How to import lists to your own account can be seen here.
Next week we will finish unit 1 by looking at the last activities we prepared at home and by working at the self-study section with unit 1.