Thursday, afternoon advanced

A bit more on Christmas today, specifically, It's a Wonderful Life. It's a solid Christmas favourite for many and well worth the watch over Christmas. If you're still in Dublin, maybe you can go to see it in the cinema - times here.

I also mentioned a website for movies in the public domain. Here are two worth looking at:

Open Flix

Public Domain Flicks

Enjoy them!

We also spent a fair bit of time talking about the difference between two commonly mistaken words, most of them weren't too bad but a few really got you. Test yourself every now and again, it doesn't hurt!

And finally, would you like to hear Judith's 100 word Christmas Podcast? It's absolutely fantastic, I admire your creativity Judith! Vocaroo Voice Message

Merry Christmas to you all, see you again sometime I hope.

Éadaoin

Friday, morning intermediate

Friday morning was short and sweet! We started off with a song to help you remember that stop is almost always followed by an -ing : Don't stop believing.

Listen, enjoy and remember - stop + -ing!

After a quick test we headed over to Dominick Street for the annual Christmas quiz. And can you believe it,  "Éadaoin's Angels" won?!

Well done Bernardo, DongHee, Amador and Roberta! Enjoy the chocolates and the idioms!

And a shout out to "The Sisters" also, who did very well!

After the quiz, we went to the Kingfisher restaurant for some 'Irish' food and had coffee and cakes in Roberta's favourite coffee shop on Capel St, great coffee!

See you in the new year, or again sometime. Merry Christmas everybody!

Éadaoin

Thursday, morning intermediate

Festivals

Christmas can seem like a crazy festival sometimes, shopping and eating and singing songs that you never usually hear...but today we read about some festivals that really top the charts of crazy.

I think the festival I'd like to see most would be Holi in India. The colours are so intense and the powders are perfumed so I can only imagine how it would smell too. Amazing.

Holi

We created our own festivals for Ireland too...The Egg Festival and The Potato Festival. Ok, fair enough, we do like our eggs and spuds!

We spent a little more time working on the infinitive or -ing and homework was to finish and email your Christmas blog - which you can find here.

Tuesday, afternoon advanced.

Hi everyone,

Last week before Christmas, I'm looking forward to it!

Today we spent some time reading a text about Jesus and the Aubergines. It was an interesting story with some great visuals and quite a bit of emotion too.
It was a long text so condensing it into exactly 50 words seemed like a good idea, distilling it in way. There were some interesting outcomes, I'd love you to share them here if you have time.

We listened to some short podcasts too, 100 word stories to be precise. From this website. Have a listen to a few of them and if you're wondering about any phrases don't be afraid to ask here or by email. Podcasts are a good way to test your listening, and at 100 words or 1 minute long, these won't take up too much of your time!

We finished up with some colour idioms. I'm sure none of you are tickled pink by idioms in general but for those of you who don't see the world through rose-tinted glasses, it really is important to remember a few so that you don't get left red-faced when you don't know what someone is saying to you. And don't get too browned off with them, it's just a way to brighten up your speech and make sure you don't seem to be a redneck.

Don't forget, the writing homework.I haven't exactly given you carte blanche, I'd like a 100 word story please, try to relate it to Christmas and try to use some new vocabulary you've picked up recently. Thanks!

See you on Thursday,
Éadaoin

Wednesday, morning intermediate

How long would you like to live for? 
I think I'd like to live to about 120, it's a nice even number and I think I'd have lots of time to travel a lot and meet lots of new people.

Where would you go? I love travelling, I also love coming home though.

We also looked at the grammar of gerunds and infinitives - here's an exercise for you to practice if you feel you'd like some more!

Homework:
Grammar
Inf/-ing questions - about four or five as a survey.

Tuesday, morning intermediate

Hi again,

We started off Tuesday with a Christmas survey mingle, Alison's class came in and we had a quick chat. I for one was very impressed with the pre-intermediate class, and you guys were great as always!

We concentrated on reported speech and though again for today, it's important to practice this as it's all about speaking and remembering the tense shift.

We had a great laugh playing interpreter with mother tongues, I think you all did really well - a future in translation for anyone?!

Homework:

Draft a blog entry for the Christmas blog.

Vegetarian Recipes

Last week we talked about being environmentally friendly and read an article about how vegetarianism could help solve world food shortages. As part of this, students shared their favourite vegetarian (or pescatarian) dish.

Carp in aspic (A Polish dish on Christmas Eve)
by Kinga

1 carp - 1.5-2kg
1 carrot
1 parsely root
1 leek
1 onion
1 bay leaf
1/2 litre of broth (vegetarian or meat)
1 spoon of instant gelatin
salt/black pepper

Clean the fish and cut it into rings. Clean and peel the vegetables and cut into small pieces. Cook the vegetables in the broth with salt, pepper and the bay leaf for 20 minutes. Cook the rings of carp in water (salty) for about 25 minutes, slowly.
Take the fish out of the water and put it into a deep platter in which it will be serves. Take the vegetables out of the broth and put into the platter with the fish.
Add the gelatin to the broth and mix very well. Pour the broth slowly into the platter with the fish and put it in the fridge for a few hours.

Spaghetti aguo, olio e peperoncino
by Sara and Francesco

For three people:
360g spaghetti
Extra virgin olive oil
dried hot peppers
dried parsely
salt
garlic

The instructions for this are in a video which Sara will send to me soon - she promised!!!

Apple Curry
by Rayoung

Rice
Curry powder
Apples
potatoes
onions
mushrooms
carrots
broccoli
olive oil
salt
pepper
water

Curry:
Heat the olive oil in a deep saucepan, add chopped carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, onions and broccoli and stir fry.
Pour over enough water and boil.
Bring to the boil, put vegetarian curry powder or chunks into the saucepan.
Stir in the curry paste and vegetables. You can also add some coconut milk.
Add chopped apples and simmer for a further 4-5minutes.

South East Asian Rice:
Place rice under cold running tap water using a sieve and rinse until water runs clear.
Place rice in a saucepan, pour one and a half times the amount of water over the rice.
Stir the rice and when begins to be cooked, bring it to the boil.
Simmer gently.
If rice is cooked though, turn off the heat and cover the pan with a tight-fitting lid and leave for 5mins.

DongHee's Sweet sweetpotatoes!

Roberta explaining Vegetables with Couscous

Paulista's Cuscuz

by Elainy

3 cooked sliced eggs

2 sliced tomatoes

sliced palm

half cup of olive oil

2grated onions

8 chopped tomatoes without skin or seeds

2 chopped green peppers

1 cup of peas

pepper sauce

4 cups of cornflour

2 tablespoons of cassava flour

4 cups of boiling water

Decorate the bottom and sides of a greased cake form with a centre hold (26cm diameter) with a few slices of palm, tomato and egg.

 

 In a saucepan with the olive oil, cook and stir the grated onions, chopped tomatoes and green peppers. Add the sliced palm, peas and pepper sauce and mix. Pour in the boiling water, mix and bring to the boil. Add the cornflour and cassava flour slowly while mixing.

Put the mixture in the cake form, turn upside down in a dish and serve.

Aubergine parmigiana

by Naima

2 aubergines (eggplants)

400g mozzarella

300ml tomato sauce seasoned with herbs

1 egg, lightly beaten

bread crumbs

Cut the aubergines into slices lengthwise and put salt on them.

Dip the aubergine slices in egg and then in breadcrumbs, fry in hot oil and set aside.

In a baking dish, place the aubergine slices and sauce.

Top with cheese and bake in an oven to melt.

 If you cook any of these dishes let us know how it goes!

Thanks everyone.

Éadaoin

Monday, morning intermediate

Last week before Christmas! Can you believe it? I'm excited about my Christmas holidays, three whole weeks. I've got a lot planned!

Anyway, getting back to today. We had two newcomers this morning - Samanta and Melissa, welcome!
We started off with a little question session about the weekend. Everyone wrote five words and their partner had to ask a lot of questions to find out what they meant. It's a good way to practice questions, especially in the past. Remember, if there's an auxiliary verb in the question, like do, the main verb remains in infinitive - What party did you go to?

Here are our objectives for the week:

Next up we had a small chat about being famous. Which would you rather be, a famous writer or famous actor? We talked about the pros and cons of being famous too.

After making some questions and inventing some famous personalities, we conducted interviews for a little while. Asking present perfect questions to open a topic and then following up with some past simple questions for details.

We finished the interviews with a little time to spare to we looked quickly at reported/indirect speech which we will continue tomorrow. But here's a little cartoon and a table of tenses for reported speech.

The part in red at the bottom of this table refers to the reporting verb - some examples include say, tell, ask, announce, explain.

For example : Bernardo said "Money can't buy you love" - 

Bernardo said that money couldn't buy love. 

OR 

Bernardo always says that money can't buy love.

Put the following statements into the reported speech.

1. " I have something to show you," I said to her.

2. " Nothing grows in my garden. It never gets any sun," she said.

3. " I'm going away tomorrow, mother," he said.

4. " I've been in London for a month but so far I haven't had time to visit the Tower," said Rupert.

5. " It isn't so foggy today as it was yesterday," I remarked.

6. " The new underpass is being officially opened the day after tomorrow," said the BBC reporter.

7. " We have moved into our new flat, " said my aunt.

8. " We have a lift but very often it doesn't work," they said.

9. " I can see the Eiffel Tower from one of the windows of my flat," he said.

10. " I've no idea what the time is," said his daughter.

Homework:

• Reported speech basic revision
• Think of something to write for our class Christmas blog - I've written my entry and you'll find it here BLOG
• You can email me yours or post it to the blog yourself.

Thursday, afternoon advanced

Hi everyone,

We started today with a game of 'hidden word'. Wow, you were terrible at the beginning but got into the swing of things (the rhythm) quite quickly. Vincent used his detective skills to great effect and Vito even got it after a few passes. Fluency is a skill that needs to be developed like any other.

We moved on to some language development then. With some circumlocution phrases such as thingy, thingumajig, whatsit and yer man. I forgot to mention that Irish people often use the word 'yolk' to refer to thing; "What's the name of the yoke that you use to crush garlic again?"

You'll find a reference to it here in an Irish blog.

Speaking of blogs, have you got Bloglovin'? It's a great RSS reader which looks like a magazine. Reading blogs is a great way to find new vocabulary and find a way to read about subjects and topics you really enjoy. You need to find the blogs, but Bloglovin will keep them for you to read and give you headlines and images to help you decide to read or not.

We also talked about ways of using get in different phrases. To get something, to get something done, to get someone on their own etc. We also looked at ways of cushioning or softening a criticism, for example -  Your party wasn't the best one I've ever been to, no offence intended.(first phrase: negative auxiliary + positive adjective, then further softened by no offence intended.)

We spent a little time trying to work those phrases into open conversation before moving on to a little phrasal verb work.

I think we still need to work on that quite a bit so I intend to spend some more time on that next Tuesday. We also didn't get to the podcast...Sorry about that. But I do promise you that next Tuesday we'll have a couple. I have them all ready, there's even a Christmas one!

Homework:
Vocabulary exercises from the two vocab SHEETS I gave you in class.

See you next week, have a great weekend!
Éadaoin

Thursday, morning intermediate

Hi everyone,

So today we started with a little work on prepositions again. They're quite difficult to remember so I advise you not to worry about trying to remember them, but it's a better idea to try to notice them. Maybe just one day a week have a prepositions day - in a newspaper article try to underline all the cases of adjective+preposition or every verb+preposition. It will help!

What preposition does responsible depend on?

Ooooops, terrible what? Can you remember?

Also, graded readers are a great way to improve all your grammar, and your vocabulary. You'll find them in Delfin Dominick St, the city library in the ILAC centre and in a lot of bookshops and online. You can even take a test here to see which level you should be reading at to enjoy it the most.

DongHee keeps Lenaic and Naima enthralled with his story!

After the prepositions work we moved on to some story telling work. There were three very interesting stories with two very similar themes: murder and romance! You pushed your narrative tenses and learned a little new vocabulary too!

Towards the end of the class we looked at some phrasal verbs with get. We're going to look at these a little more tomorrow, don't worry!

Homework:

• Do the phrasal verb sheet again.
• Write a short story containing five of the phrasal verbs with get.
• Study for the test - zero, first and second conditional, adjective+preposition, vocabulary from the article we read on Wednesday.

See you tomorrow!

Wednesday, morning intermediate

Hi,

Wednesday over, more than halfway through the week already!

Today we started with a bit of conditionals practice - some stories developed starting with just one conditional phrase. It was a little confusing but great practice and the stories were interesting.

We moved on to talk about food - sorry, I know some of you were really hungry! We read an article from the Guardian but were on our feet:

Bernardo and Nia reading on their feet.

For homework I asked you to look at the collocations, so here is the text in full. If you click on the picture you can save it and make it bigger.

And here is the phonemic pronunciation for some of the words in the text.

After correcting yesterday's homework we listened to a BBC English production which you will find here: BBC Six minute English. It's a great website where you can listen to lots of interesting radio articles that are quite comfortable to listen to.

Homework:

• Collocations
• A vegetarian recipe to present to the class on Friday. Or make a video of yourself cooking at home and post it here!!!

See you tomorrow,

Éadaoin

Tuesday, afternoon advanced.

Hi everyone,

Today we spent the entire class focusing on stretching our already existing vocabulary and highly active listening.

We started with a game of interruptions. The winner was the person speaking at the end of the minute. This meant the question-askers had to concentrate on asking appropriate and lonnnnng questions!

We then did a quick intonation exercise to practice suspense-question intonation. It was silly and over-dramatic but good fun too.

Moving on quickly we watched a short.  'Whodunnit' clip trying to spot the changes in the set. I think the average was about 8 for most people, not bad. But out of 21?! Really?

With that done we moved on to our own' whodunnit'. We created the house,  the characters; victim and suspects, and their motives. Most of them were motivated to kill by money - interesting,  class, very interesting!

Patricia turned out to be the murderer. And although the detectives were pretty sure it was her or her lover, she did very well under pressure. She even turned on the crocodile tears early on!

And here's a little clip from 'Murder She Wrote', just for fun. The Irish episode...!

To finish, we talked about the pros mad cons of living in a fabulous manor house like our murder mystery family or in a town house like Delfin Dominick St. would once have been.

Homework:

Spoken and/or written answer to your question regarding town or country.
Remember, work on the skill that you need to develop more. And if you choose to do both exercises then do the spoken part first so you don't end up reading from a script.

See you Thursday for some listening and podcasting! Don't forget your phone headphones if you have them.

Tuesday, morning intermediate

Hi again,

This morning there were only seven students in class, I thought there were some scaredy cats - some people afraid of asking some simple questions on the street! But Rayoung and Amador made it in just after the break so eventually there were nine students, not so bad!

We started this morning by focussing on questions. We played "The Yes/No Gameshow" - a fast-paced question game where the respondents cannot answer with yes or no, they may not hesitate and they may not repeat their answers. 

Then I asked you all to think of some good questions to ask me. But I didn't answer, instead, Naima became me for a few minutes and answered on my behalf - and was correct almost every time! But Naima, I love Guinness!!

After that we moved back to our talk from yesterday about being green. This time we talked about eco-friendly methods of transport. 

Here is our list of pros and cons about electric cars. For now we all agree that there are more cons. But hope that will change.

And then we moved along to second conditional to talk about imaginary or unreal situations or events that are not very likely.

If I won the lottery, I would quit my job at Delfin.

If + past, modal (would, could, might) + inf.

However, this is unlikely in two ways - I don't play the lottery and I love my job too much to quit!

We also talked about using if only and I wish to express unfulfilled desires or to emphasise a lack of something rather than the result.

Then, the moment we all dreaded just a little bit - survey time! I gave each of you a set of ten questions and sent you out to the streets for 15minutes. It was a lovely sunny afternoon and there was a brass band playing Christmas songs on O'Connell St - what a perfect time to be outside!

Brass band outside Cleary's Department Store

Francesco, Elainy & Rayoung talking to a man who is celebrating his 51st wedding anniversary with his beautiful wife in the Canaries this Christmas. Lovely!

Bernardo and Amador at the GPO

We got some lovely answers and some answers that were impossible to understand but that's just how it goes! It was fun and interesting all the same.

Homework:

• Second conditional grammar exercises
• Prepositions exercises.

See you all tomorrow - if you make it home from Dicey's!
Éadaoin

Monday, morning intermediate.

Monday again already!

Welcome to Roberta who joined us today from Daniel's class, and also to Francesco who almost got switched to Derick's class!

Everybody seemed a little sleepy this morning, I think there good weekends all 'round!

We started this morning by recommending films for each other. Just because I think it's a good thing to do and it's a good way to get to know each other better. Some recommendations we had were:

• If Only
• This Must be the Place
• Big Wednesday
• The Name of the Rose
• The Blind Side
• We need to talk about Kevin

Feel free to read about these films, watch clips or watch the whole thing.
We'll talk about them more later in the week.

After that chat we moved on to talk about our objectives for the week. Based on your answers to my question last week about grammar points and skills you would like to work on, we're going to study 2nd conditional this week, phrasal verbs with get and prepositions. We're also going to do quite a bit of listening and talk to some people on the streets of Dublin too!

We started off by talking about the word green. Here you can see our answers to three questions about green - 

• What is the opposite of green?
• What does green smell like?
• What things are not green that you think should be?

We then moved on to talk about 'being green', meaning to be considerate of the natural environment.

We also talked about zero and first conditional.

We use zero conditional to talk about facts - 

e.g. - If Google employees ride their bike or skateboard to work, the company makes a charitable donation.

Zero - If + present, present.

 Then we talked about first conditional, sentences and ideas talking about real possibilities now and in the future.

e.g. If a PB Copy customer cycles the exercise bike for ten minutes, it'll power the printer to make 100 copies.
First conditional - If + present, future. (here that's will + inf.)

After our grammar point we moved on to some environmental vocabulary and we talked about reusable, disposable, refillable and energy efficient things.

Homework:

• Read and answer the 'green' questionnaire.

And don't forget, we're going out on to the streets tomorrow so wear lots of warm clothes!!

Have a great afternoon, see you tomorrow!

Éadaoin