Small talk: family

Hello, English Team,

Your homework for Wednesday's lesson is page 60 of the handouts book. Talking about your family is a good small-talk subject.

Before you come to the lesson, be sure you know these words:

acquaintance - divorced - married - mother-in-law - only child - relations - relatives - separated - single - step-son

This is one of my relatives!Guess how he is related to me!

Here are 5 names of people in my family. You can ask me about them in the lesson.

FRED - TED - ELEANOR - MARY - PAUL

You can bring in photos of your family, too, if you would like to.

I would like to collect ideas from you about future lessons. What would you like? Reading, Grammar, Speaking, Writing, Internet games, something else? If you have an interesting article for the group, please bring that too.

Attila has sent me a good article about John Lennon, and we will look at that on Wednesday. You can see it here, too. JOHN LENNON'S KILLER SAYS WHY HE DID IT

Finally, here is a really mini grammar lesson, which we will practice on Wednesday. It's about "should have done" and "should be"


Sincerely,
Mary

Breaking News English

Hello, Everyone,

This is what I want you to do for the next lesson.

Go to the website, Breaking News English

You will find a nice list of recent news articles. Click on one that looks interesting to you.

For example, here is an article about Queensland Facing Major Reconstruction

When you click there, you can see the short article and a button for MP3 so you can listen to the article while you read. There are lots of activities, too.

Please try some of the listening activites. You can do some vocabulary learning tasks, too.

If you want to see more articles, on the home page, click on "See all 1,394 earlier current events lessons"

For homework, please choose an article and click on its title. Send me the address of your article by copying and pasting the address into an email message.

That's it for this week!
Sincerely,
Mary

PS Click on this link for an amazing graphic about our world!

OMG! I am late

Dear Team,

I have just remembered that I promised to send you the listening link for the article about China, and you have homework about that, too.

Well, now, here it is! I hope you still have time to practice listening and filling out the homework paper. This is an mp3 file called "China Protects its Language."
You can find it at this link on the left hand side under LISTEN.

This week in English we will revise vocabulary from the last 3 lessons, study determiners (that is a, an, the, etc.), and practice questions in a business role play.

See you very soon!

Mary

Next week at MNB English

Dear Team,

We are just about finished with our cycle of presentations. Tibor has promised to do his presentation as soon as he can. We are moving on to the following:

• intensive listening practice
• speaking about things that may, might, could, or must happen

Everyone has done the grammar test, except Edit, who was on holiday last week. Results coming soon!

Here is something new that I have tried: a Google Docs document. This is a story of people who returned to Algeria after many years. They had very strong feelings, too. Read and enjoy!

RETURN TO ALGERIA (a Google Docs document)

Sincerely,
Mary