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