Here are some activities that your students must be interested in.
Let’s start with Warm –up: Write on the board Merry Christmas and see how many words they can link up using the letters, they work in pairs or groups.
Task 1: Give your students a set of different questions and give specific time to answer them.
- Have you ever spent Christmas in a different country? If so, was it very different to how you usually spend Christmas?
- How much do you know about what happens at Christmas around the world?
Task 2: Elicit the information they know about Christmas around the world. Give the countries: Belgium, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Russia, United States of America
See the full text here: http://www.soon.org.uk/en/articles/christmas/around-the-world.html
Task 3: New Year’s Resolution
Have you ever made any new year’s resolutions? In the UK many people make resolutions for the New Year. These are promises they make to themselves. Typical resolutions may be to give up smoking, do more exercise or to read more books. Think about what you would like to promise yourself for the next year. Write three New Year’s resolutions here:
1.
2.
Task 4: Santa Profile
A set of questions are given to students (individually, pairs, groups…). Each student, pair, group answers the questions to form their profile of Santa. They change partners / groups and share the images of Santa they have created.
- What does Christmas mean to Santa?
- Was Santa a good student at school?
- Who are Santa’s neighbors?
- How does he remember who wants what for Xmas?
- Where does Santa go shopping?
- Is Santa an optimist or a pessimist?
- What kind of house does Santa live in?
- What does Santa do between December 26 and Dec 23?
- Does Santa’s sleigh have air-bags or navigation?
- How does he get into houses that have no chimneys?
- Which country does he like visiting best?
- What’s his favourite sport?
- Does he ever shave?
- Where does Santa go on vacation?
- Is Santa good at building snowmen, or having snowball fights?
- What’s Santa’s dream?
- What does ‘ho-ho-ho’ mean?
- How much is Santa’s salary and Does he get any bonuses?
Task 5: What makes What makes Xmas magical for you? Here are some categories- think about food / presents / family / lights / shopping / alcohol / church / no work / no school / other.
Task 6 : Unusual Christmas Presents
If you’ve ever received an unusual gift speak about it or create yourself funny ones.
We wish you the happiest holiday time!
English Book Team
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In the classroom of the future, small groups of children work messily together on a number of “expeditions” to create amazing machines out of LEGO , scan seashells to be printed in 3D to help them explore under the sea, and tell them their own stories using sound.
By using the latest technology , such as 3D printers, fully immersive work stations – which are rather like working on two screens with one of them a touch screen projected onto the table in front of you- and hybrid text books, it’s hoped that teachers and publishers will be shifted from being providers of information to being supporters and prompters of the learning experience.
The hybrid textbook is much like a traditional textbook with text and pictures but also connects to a world of students -, teacher and publisher – generated digital material with the wave of a smartphone over an invisible watermark.
Its creator Hewlett Packard believes that this will help the students of today prepare for their own future in the knowledge economy- if in a rather controlled way that keeps parents and teachers happy.
Education can be innovative and international, and publishers can find new ways of delivering material in the future.
Author: Mark Piesing
Source: Frankfurt Show Daily
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If listeners are going to invest 10 or 15 hours listening to an audiobook, then the production team owes it to them to invest attention to detail. Our role as a production company is to select a reader, and then support that reader so that between us we achieve a recording that expresses as closely as possible our perception of the author’s intentions. In the case of non-fiction, that means ensuring the logical flow of the explanation or arguments, and in the case of fiction it means ensuring that the sound- pictures are well drawn, with every character distinct appropriately voiced. The listener should be immersed in the ideas or the story and any distractions by jerky reading or wrong pronunciations are a failure on the reader’s and producer’s part.
Recording an audiobook well is as much a performance as a stage play or a film.
The reader of an audiobook has to be utterly in sympathy with what he or she is reading. Pulitzer Prizer winner Eudora Welty wrote in her autobiography, “Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify certainly not my own. It is human, but inward and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers-to read as listeners- and with all writers, to write as listeners.”
I thinks that encapsulates what a really good audiobook should achieve- we provide a physical embodiment of that internal voice for listeners. Sometimes, a well-informed interpretation can even enhance understanding and offer more to the listener than the reading of the printed book would have done.
Author: Nicholas Jones
Source: Frankfurt Show Daily
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