BACK TO THE GRIND AFTER THE EASTER BREAK!

-

OMG! Time does fly! It has been ages since I last posted on my C1 blog. I have been as busy as a bee and had no time at all to devote to my facet as an amateur blogger. My apologies, everyone! Nothing can be done now but just... mend my ways! So, here comes a new update!馃挭

Going back to the grind in class after a holiday break (we have just enjoyed our Easter week!) has always proved to be challenging. Unfortunately enough, most students have got into the mood of getting away from their learning馃槈. That is why setting up the right class atmosphere on the very first session after the holiday is always on my top-priority list. No wonder some retrieval practice will do the trick! 

So, I entered my classroom with a very positive mindset, determined to grab my students' attention and kick-start the lesson with a retrieval quiz. I designed it on @genially_es (I simply love it for quizzes!) to recall some of the expressions regarding fast fashion and social responsibility we had been working on in our Student's Book just before the holiday:


Once the right mood was gauged, I moved on to this reading activity. If you are interested in having a sneak peek at the original source, I have just added the site link at the bottom of the document. This time students worked in pairs (I had previously divided them into As and Bs) to quickly scan just half of the text to find the headings that matched their paragraphs. So typical! No mysteries there! The fun part happened when they got together with another pair to find out that they had chosen the same heading for some of their paragraphs! Some lively debate took place and, in the end, everybody got their answers correctly.

Last, but not least, we used the ideas in the text above to accomplish an oral task that was set just like in the exam. As we are getting closer to exam dates, students are becoming more and more anxious, and doing some extra exam training is always welcome. You may also take this as an opportunity to check up on how oral mediation and production work here in Galicia!

The good thing about this session was that the students could grab some of the ideas and vocabulary from both the retrieval quiz and the reading comprehension task above and use them as a source of inspiration for the final oral mediation and production tasks. It came as no surprise that their anxiety got reduced and the class session resulted in huge success. So, devoting time to the previous reading comprehension task was key!

I hope you have enjoyed this idea! Just let me know how it goes if you try some of this in class!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MEDIATION: RELAYING INFORMATION FROM GRAPHS AND INFOGRAPHICS

-
In the  mediation  tasks of the C1 exam, both oral and written, you might be asked to either give a short descriptive speech or write a short descriptive report based on visual information or data. This visual information will be most commonly presented as line and bar graphs , pie charts or tables . You will definitely be asked to describe and analyze the information provided by selecting and reporting its main features. In the presentation below, I will be focusing on some of the key factors to be considered when dealing with data analysis. First of all, you will learn how to look for the most obvious information to eventually find out what the numbers on a graph are referring to. Our final goal would be coming up with a structured piece of text on the data analysis, which you will also be able to find out by clicking on each of the graphs! Ready? Pull your socks up and go! This presentation is based on the writing activities in Unit 4 of New Language Lea...
Read more

MEDIATION: A SURVIVAL GUIDE

-
Image
Most EOI students are now very well acquainted with this new part of the exam that has come to stay:  Mediation . However, it seems to me that some of them are still struggling with it in light of the results of the mid-term exams that took place at school a couple of weeks ago.  As mediation is everywhere and plays a crucial role in our daily lives, have a look at some great tips beautifully given by teacher M贸nica Redondo that might help you understand what mediation is. I have tried this presentation below with my C1 students in class and it achieved immediate success. M贸nica explains mediation beautifully and the sample texts also helped students make up a clear idea of the task. I hope it greases the wheels for them to enhance a deeper understanding of mediation!
Read more

MEDIATION TASK: THE FOOD WASTE EFFECT

-
We have been working on strategies to come up with nice pieces of writing, mainly focusing on how to relay information from infographics. My C1 students have definitely been working hard to bring their compositions up to scratch. After also checking vocabulary on consumerism and shopping, here are their final summaries synthesizing the key aspects of the pie chart below. Measures to be taken to cut down on food waste is the next step. These summaries will be the starting point for the proposal pieces coming over! Stay tuned!
Read more

Sharing is caring... so, let´s care!

Licencia de Creative Commons
Have fun with English C1.2 by Paula G贸mez is licensed under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional License.