Finding something new on the news

The news have some real life vocabulary. When you read the news, there's some condensed precious pieces of information and grammar that can't simply be ignored. There are many idioms and summarized phrases in a couple of expressions. So, as the tip of the day, develop the habit of checking the news even if it's just a couple of minutes a day.

How?

You can download news apps on your phone, which will give you daily notifications about what's going on in the world. Also, include one or two news pages on your daily browsing. It's really not that painful.

Heart by Movie

We all LOVE watching movies. It doesn't really matter what genre we like, watching movies is a people's favorite.

So here are some tips today:

• Pick your favorite scene from your favorite movie, and memorize it. Saying it by heart will improve your pronunciation and intonation on the right places on the phrases. 
• If you're not immersed in an ESL community, being exposed to the language could be very difficult. 
• Watch movies so you can learn real life situations, vocabulary, and idioms. It will give you more confidence when speaking English.

Last Monday Activity - The Michelangelo Olympics

So, the theme for last block in school was art, and since not everyone is into art like others, we had the Michelangelo Olympics, where students (and teachers) could learn a bit more about art. 

We separated the whole school in 8 groups, where the students had to perform different activities to win. They had to sing songs, sculpt in play dough, draw, and do mimics of different famous people and daily situations. 

In the end, there were 4 teams competing against each other, and because the time was shorter, there was a lot of excitement and pressure, since the last round was in front of the whole school.

Every two weeks we have activities like this one, and even though it's out of the student's comfort zone, they love it!

The Power of Reading

We all have already heard how reading improves your vocabulary and comprehension. Reading is extremely beneficial for your ESL process, and that's why we should not take it for granted, and this post was created to point out some other ways to glean the most out of ESL reading.

There's just so much you can learn from reading. Yes, it is probably the most knowledge acquiring learning strategy, but reading has the disadvantage of not allowing the learner to practice speaking or listening.

But there's a way to get around that

Reading Aloud

It is amazing how powerful tool that reading is for speaking, once you use it on the right way. Of course it could be a bit awkward and challenging in the beginning, but you WILL get used to it. There won't be anyone around you to correct you, but at least you will get your brain used to English speaking already. There's a lot of vocabulary and idioms learned on reading activities, and 90% of ESL students say it is hard to start speaking because they don't know what to say! The process of thinking-speaking will be shorter, so you will get less stuck when speaking to someone native.

AudioBooks

For almost all the best-sellers nowadays, there's also an audiobook version of them. Some people choose to listen to it instead of reading the actual hard copy book, but why not using both at the same time? When you read the book and listen to the words, you practice both reading (fast reading by keeping up with the audio version) and speaking (reading the words on the book and learning how to pronounce them from the audio version + the rhythm when speaking)

If you feel like putting to work what you've just read, here's a link of online books which also offer audio versions on the same page, so you can go to work as soon as you're done reading this article.