Monday, Morning Intermediate

Today was the first day for Kinga from Poland and Sara and Francesco from Italy - welcome!
It's also the first day of this blog, let's see how it goes!!

We started the class with some 'circle introductions', spending a minute or so talking to a partner about ourselves and our hometowns, our families, our hobbies and our weekends. And then we tried to remember it...!

Weekly Plan

We talked about our plan and objectives for the week.

Then we moved on to talking about decisions. We talked about major life decisions and talked about which were the most important and life-changing.

Here are some of the topics we thought about.

Decisions

After that, we read about and listened to the story of Debra and Andrew Veal. We read about how Andrew developed a phobia (irrational fear) of the ocean and how Debra decided to finish the race to Barbados with out him.

As we found out more of their story, we talked about some ways to discuss the past using the modals SHOULD have, WOULD have and COULD have. Don't forget, we can use shouldn't have and wouldn't have but we don't use couldn't have to talk about unreal or imaginary past.

Unreal Past

Having discussed their story fully, we moved on to some pronunciation work - weak forms of grammatical words. Everybody felt a little overwhelmed by the exercise but I reminded everyone that I'm trying to raise your awareness of weak sounds and I don't expect you to speak or understand them immediately!

Weak forms - lots of schwas! 

Homework:

• Workbook grammar exercises.
• Post one photo from the weekend to the facebook page and tell us a little about it. Try to use one sentence with could have/ should(n't) have or would(n't) have. 

Can you remember any of the vocabulary that came up during the class?
Like abandon and give up, or overcome. Put them in the comments below if you think they're important.