Tag: B1

Intermediate 1

B1 · B2 · C1 · C2 · Vocabulary · vocabulary activity

B1 B2 C1 C2 What do you call a baby ant?

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I found this query on the internet and couldn’t help laughing. Of course, baby ants don’t really exist as such (meaning that you’d be really surprised to find a tiny version of an ant being reared by its parents, wouldn’t you?). But anyway, a baby ant would actually be an egg, a larva or a pupa, depending on the stage (of its babyhood!). But, what do we call other animals such as baby kangaroos or chickens? What’s more, what are their parents called? Here’s a quiz to check on this really interesting aspect of the animal world and the English language.

I hope you enjoy it!

Click here for the animal vocabulary quiz

A2 · B1 · B2 · Grammar · Grammar activity

Different ways to use the verb Stop

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Among some of the problems students come across when learning English, are those verbs that have more than one verb pattern with a change of meaning and ‘stop’ happens to be one of them. Here you’ll find a short presentation on ways to use ‘stop’. Afterwards, you can practise with the two different activities, one is for lower levels while the second activity is for students that are higher up on their knowledge of English. I hope you find the activity useful.

Below you will find the link to the lesson.

Click here for lesson

Below you’ll find a quiz for A2/B1 levels

Click for the quiz

Below you’ll find a quiz for B2 levels

Click for Stop with ‘-ing’ or ‘to infinitive’ activity

B1 · B2 · C1 · Grammar · Grammar activity

The causative: have/get something done

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Causative structures are another form of passive structures where the focus is on something that is done rather than who does it. Here’s a video I made with bitable that will give you some tips on some of the different structures.

After, you can do a grammar activity to practise the structure.

Click for video

Click for activity

B1 · B2 · Learning English with songs · Listening · phonetics

Learning English pronunciation with songs: I’ll Keep you Safe

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A great way to learn English is watching a film, but the thing is, how many of us have the time to watch films these days? I mean, I can hardly remember the last time I was able to relax on my settee with this intention, let alone watching one in a foreign language!

Definitely, present-day duties just don’t seem to understand our needs, do they? So, unless we can plug vocabulary, stress patterns and pronunciation into our brains just like those guys did in The Matrix, we’ll need a backup plan.

Why not try listening to music? It’s easy and fun. You can do this, working, cooking, driving, walking the dog, writing or whatever (as long as it doesn’t make you get up and start dancing). Music can also teach us structures that we need to get our tongues around, and a great number of songs have really catchy tunes that we’ll enjoy trying to understand and even learn.

Here I’ve exploited the soundtrack from the movie Up by Disney. The song is I’ll Keep you Safe by Sleeping at last. It´s a wonderful song along with a beautiful video (watch out! It could make you quite emotional! ) and although the title is great for dealing with ‘will’ used for promises, here  I’ve exploited it to practise some of the English sounds and to help students become more familiar with phonetic symbols. If you haven’t  seen anything about phonetics yet, you may want to brush up a bit on them before doing the activity (you’ll find plenty of introductory activities if you click on the menu Phonetics and English sounds).

Anyway, hope you enjoy the lesson.

PS If you don’t see me around much lately, it’s just that I’m SO STRESSSSSSSSSSSSSEDDDD OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUT!!!!!!!!!!!

Click for the activity

A2 · B1 · Grammar

Conditionals: 1st Conditional game

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Oh! This week we’re going to do some work on conditionals. So, just to get this structure under our belt, I’ve set up this fun activity with Wheel decide.

How to play? Click on the wheel and see what you get for the question ‘What will you do if …?

Write down the sentence and spend a minute thinking about your answer, afterwards tell the class.

Example:

What will you do if the person you love asks you out?

Possible answers: If the person I love asks me out, I will go crazy/faint/be extremely happy/buy myself something very smart/go to the hairdresser’s to look great.

Click for action wheel”>Click for Wheel

A2 · B1 · B2 · Vocabulary · vocabulary activity

Confusing words: dish/meal/recipe

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Many students get these word wrong and since I’ve uploaded some vocabulary for ingredients, it may be a good idea to go over them or learn them.

Dish

The word dish when used as a noun and not a verb, has two meanings. One is the type of recipient we use for putting food on. A dish is usually shallow or almost flat, so for a soup we would rather use a bowl.

  • Nothing like a nice dish of pasta!
  • Who broke the glass dish?
  • He was awarded a silver dish for his fortieth anniversary in the company .

The second way of using the word ‘dish’ is when we are talking about a special recipe and way to prepare it. Usually these dishes have a special name that might or might not give us any information about the ingredients. Some examples are: paella, roast beef, lasagne, Welsh rarebit, haggis, etc.

  • What’s your favourite dish?
  • Paella isn’t the only Spanish dish you can have in Spain. This country has a wide variety of traditional dishes from all over the country.
  • I can recommend the chef’s dish of the day.
  • What shall we have for main dish?

There is another use for the word dish, but nobody seems to like using it after having a meal. Saying ‘doing the dishes’ or ‘ the dishes’ has a funny effect on people and it must be magical because people just seem to disappear. 🙂 Notice that here we use this word in the plural form.

  • Who’s going to help me do the dishes?
  • It’s not fair. I did the dishes yesterday!

Meal

This is a general word for the food we eat during the day, when it isn’t a snack (for instance, a packet of crips isn’t a meal no matter what some people may claim). A meal could be breakfast, luch, dinner or supper ( by the way, I’ll post something about these names for meals a little later on). And the main meal of the day depends where you are from. Some people in England have their main meal in the evening while in Spain it is usually in the afternoon.

  • I try not to eat between meals.
  • Next Saturday we’re going out for a meal at that really posh restaurant they have just opened.

Recipe

Recipe refers to the way in which we choose to prepare a meal. A recipe usually is a set of instructions telling us how to cook something and what ingredients we need. For example, if I want to prepare a traditional dish like paella, because I want to serve this for lunch (a meal), I may need the recipe to make sure I do it properly.

  • Can I get the recipe for that delicious chocolate cake you made the other day?
  • I’ve lost the recipe book and I can’t remember the amount of flour I will need.
Click for the quiz
Upper intermediate listening activity · Upper intermediate open cloze activity

Listening activity Intermediate B1: The Computer Says No

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Carol Beer.gif
gif from Gfycat.com

Have you ever been to a hospital reception, a bank or any public place where you were treated rudely or even roughly? What did you feel like?

In the last book I read – by the way it was Andrea Levy’s ‘Every Light in the House Burnin’- the narrator fantasizes on picking up a doctor by the throat because she had referred to her dying father as ‘Old man Jacobs’ and shown a great deal of aloofness. The novel, in fact, devotes some chapters to humorously criticizing the English healthcare system. Fortunately, the novel is set in London during the 60s and many things have improved since then.

As an activity that can raise some subject of debate in an English class or serve as a warm-up activity as well as serving the purpose for practising Your listening skills you can click on the video.

After you can also do some use of English practice with a text from Wikipedia on the same subject which has been adapted as an open cloze for missing prepositions, adverbs, relative pronouns/adverbs or articles.

Click for listening

Click here for open cloze

Disclaimers

  • Video from Youtube channel Beferninand
  • Text for Open Cloze from Wikipedia