road safety

The topic on LearnEnglish Kids this month is road safety. You will find songs, stories and a new game called Road Safety Run in the topics section, plus links to resources for children, parents and teachers developed by the UK's Department of Transport's Think! campaign.

	new song - keep safe, stay alive!
Dino the dog has a special job. He helps people to keep safe on the roads. This song presents 5 lessons about road safety. Before you listen to the song, can you and your child guess what they are? Listen to the song to see if you are right. You can also download the lyrics, some activities and a word puzzle to do offline.

	new story - a dog's life
Dino the dog has a very busy life keeping people safe on the roads. Read and listen to his diary and find out what he did last week. You can print some activities to do offline too. Perhaps you could write a simple diary with your child!

	more about road safety
Think! is the UK Government's campaign to improve people's behaviour on the roads. You will find resources for children, parents and teachers on these websites: Think! Education Tales of the Road .

Leitura fácil e divertida é o melhor caminho

Sem sombra de dúvida, para melhorar a leitura com rapidez, deve-se ler livros fáceis e interessantes. Deve-se ler muito - pelo menos uma hora por dia. Mas tem que ser um livro fácil.

A regra é simples: você nao deve precisar de dicionário para ler e entender o livro. Se precisar de um dicionário é porque está difécil demais e você deve achar algo mais fácil.

Você deve ser capaz de entender de 98 a 99% das palavras. É muito fácil adivinhar o significado de uma palavra que a gente não conhece. Não é preciso usar um dicionário.

O que devo ler?

O tipo de livro que mais gostar: infantil, mistério, ficção científica, romance, quadrinhos, etc. Todos são ótimos. Mas procure os fáceis!

9 Meses para turbinar a leitura!

Se fizer isso por uma hora todos os dias, voce vai ficar impressionado(a) com o progrsso super rápido.

Eu garanto que vai melhorar muito mais rápido que alunos que ficam lendo textos dificeis.

Encontre livrinhos fáceis e interessantes e leia!


www.InglesAgora.com.br
westmontlibrary.org/Boy%20Buried%20in%20Book.gif

SMOKING

31 May is World No-Tobacco Day. Practise your English while you learn about smoking. Have a look at the article, poems, word game, cartoon, trivia and links. http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-themes-smoking.htm

CONSPIRACIES

Practise your English while you learn about conspiracies. Take a look at the article, story, cartoon, word game, trivia and links. http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-themes-conspiracies.htm

Academic Listening

This programme takes a look at a range of techniques to make listening to lectures easier.
Download the programme (8 MB)
Download the script (46 KB)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/talkaboutenglish/2009/04/090427_tae_al.shtml?001

Blind Masseurs

This week, we find out about an interesting challenge to an employment law in South Korea. The law was passed in 1963 and stops people who aren't blind from taking jobs as massage therapists. Is this law absolutely crucial to one group of people whilst being unfair to others? Yvonne Archer is joined by William Kremer as she looks at a very difficult issue.

This week's question: Approximately how many people in the world are living with a disability of some kind?

a) 2%
b) 10%
c) 12%

You'll hear the answer at the end of the programme!


Vocabulary from the programme

a massage therapist
someone who uses his or her hands and fingers to rub different areas of the head, limbs and body to help stop pain or increase movement

masseurs
male massage therapists, but also used for females

masseuses
female massage therapists, never used for males

decades
tens of years ? a decade is ten years

cannot cope with demand
is unable to manage and complete all the work there is to do on time

awash with
literally, covered in water, but here, used as an adjective to describe a place where there are lots of people

Example sentence:
"During the summer months, the streets are awash with people."

barbers' shops
a place where people, usually men, pay to have their hair cut

sighted
able to see

practitioners
people who do something that's practical

non-visually impaired
able to see, having no problems with eyesight

constitutional court
a legal court where laws are made or changed

a monopoly
an exclusive right to do something

patronising
treating people as though they are children, have little intelligence or are of little importance

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Extras
Download this programme (mp3 - 2.8 MB)
Programme script (pdf - 40K)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/144_6minute/

English Idioms

What is an Idiom?
There are two features that identify an idiom: firstly, we cannot deduce the meaning of the idiom from the individual words; and secondly, both the grammar and the vocabulary of the idiom are fixed, and if we change them we lose the meaning of the idiom. Thus the idiom "pull your socks up" means "improve the way you are behaving" (or it can have a literal meaning); if we change it grammatically to "pull your sock up" or we change its vocabulary to "pull your stockings up", then we must interpret the phrase literally - it has lost its idiomatic meaning.
More about Idioms
Idioms reference with example sentences and quizzes
Idioms help - ask a question

Head idioms

1. It's like banging your head against a brick wall
2. He's got his head in the clouds
3. An old head on young shoulders

Downloads
The Teacher (MP4 - 20 MB)

Video Download Notes
1. These video files are large and can take a long time to download.
2. Click here to find out about MP4 files

After you've watched the video, why not download the script?
Programme script (pdf - 16 K)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/multimedia/the_teacher/latest_video.shtml

Vocabulary lesson: Money

Submitted by admin on Thu, 05/06/2008 - 3:06am.
The lesson aims to raise students' awareness of verbs which collocate with ‘money' and give them practice of using them. and promote learner autonomy by encouraging the deduction of meaning of unknown lexis from context.

Download lesson plan 28k pdf

Worksheets
Worksheet 1 85k pdf - Pictures
Worksheet 2 14k pdf- Text
Worksheet 3 22k pdf - OHT: verbs
Worksheet 4 19k pdf - Matching exercise
Worksheet 5 16k pdf - Gap-fill exercise
Worksheet 6 15k pdf- Discussion questions (to be cut up)

Procedure
Give the students the pictures (worksheet 1). Tell them that you are going to read a short description of two brothers, and that all the pictures are somehow connected to the description. Ask them in pairs to predict what they are going to hear about. Elicit ideas.
Read the text about John and his brother (worksheet 2) to the students and afterwards ask them to tell each other what the actual story was about.
Nominate students to tell the class about the significance of the pictures. E.g. "Who do you think the man in the first picture is?" "Why is there a picture of a casino?"
Read the story to the students again and this time ask them to note down the verbs that are used in the text that collocate with ‘money'. E.g. spend, save. Tell them that there are 15 verbs.
Ask them to compare their findings with a partner.Tip: They will probably not have been able to get all of the verbs after one listening.
Read the story one more time and ask students to check the verbs that they had heard and try to listen for more.
Ask them to compare answers again
Elicit verbs from students and reveal them on an overhead transparency with the past simple and past participle forms. (worksheet 3) Drill the pronunciation of the verbs, but don't get into the meaning of unknown vocabulary.
Tip: Tell them that they are going to try to discover the meanings for themselves in the next activity. (You can give them their own copy if you like)
Give the students a copy of the story (worksheet 2) and the matching exercise (worksheet 4). Ask the students to work individually and try to match the verbs with their definitions using the story as a context from which to deduce meaning.
Give the students a few minutes to check their answers in pairs and then check as a class.Tip: Ask concept questions to check understanding. E.g. "If I waste money on new shoes, do I really need the shoes?" "If you borrow money from somebody, is it yours or do you have to give it back?"
Give out gap-fill exercise (worksheet 5), which students complete in pairs. Check as a class.
Divide the class into groups of 3-4 students.You can either
Give them the questions (worksheet 6) as prompts for discussion. Cut them up beforehand and ask them to look at one question at a time. Encourage students to ask further questions and not just give yes/no answers. Or
You could stick the individual questions on the walls around the classroom and ask the students to take it in turns to go up to a question, memorise it, come back to their group and dictate it to them. (Running dictation) Once all the questions have been written down, they can discuss their answers
If you have time, you can have some class feedback: Students tell the class what the most interesting answers were in each group.

Written by Janet Shackleton, British Council Malaysia
Attachment
Size
money_vocabulary_lesson_plan.pdf
28.02 KB
pictures_worksheet_1.pdf
84.91 KB
text_worksheet_2.pdf
13.95 KB
OHT_worksheet_3.pdf
22.16 KB
matching_exercise_worksheet_4.pdf
18.92 KB
Gap-fill_worksheet_5.pdf
15.77 KB
discussion_worksheet_6.pdf
14.92 KB

http://teachingenglish.org.uk/try/lesson-plans/vocabulary-lesson-money

Collocations - words have friends too!

When learning words it is helpful to notice and to learn some of the words that they often occur with (their collocations). This helps learners to manipulate 'chunks' of language, and to work with greater fluency. The new edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary contains over 500 special collocation boxes in addition to the essential collocates that are shown in the dictionary entry. The activities in the worksheet focus on this great feature of the dictionary, and aim to help students to make use of the ways in which the Macmillan English Dictionary gives information on collocations.

Worksheet
Teacher's Notes