Welcome to Laskenglish, the English blog from Laskorain Ikastola. It has been specially designed for our students and it will be developed with everybody's help. If you want us to publish your post contact us at: laskenglish@gmail.com
Students from DBH3, DBH4, BATX 1 and BATX 2 can apply for a grant to go abroad in summer to learn English or French. If you are interested in applying for one of these, have a look at the information on dates, requirements, conditions etc before you fill in the application form.Follow these steps:
Print the page and sign it. Bring it with your NAN photocopy
You should fill in the application form, print it, sign it (you and your parents) and together with the photocopy of your identity card, give it to your English teacher by November 11th (Wednesday). Otherwise we may not have enough time to send all the application forms in time.
INFORMATION MEETINGS:
DBH 3 and DBH 4 (Wednesday, 28th, patio time)
batx 1 and 2 (Friday 30th, second breaktime in batx 2B)
Have you ever thought about the universe and the size of the planets and millions of stars there are in the universe? Here you have a video about the dimention of the universe. Stunning!
Our DBH 4 students are designing fantastic music magazines! They need to write an article on the musical preferences of the students in Laskorain Ikastola, so they need your help, please fulfill these questionnaires.
Students from DBH4 are going to release a MUSIC MAGAZINE. The magazine
is going to be appealing for teenagers, colourful, full of interesting
content and we all will learn a lot about music while we work on it. It's
going to be varied concerning topics: interviews to famous musicians,
questionnaires, contests, letters to the editor, information about
concerts and so on. We will do it in groups of 4, and we will be
working and getting information as if we were real journalists. In
addition, we will give it a nice design thanks to ICTs (Information and
communication technologies), using computer applications and programmes
such as publisher. MUSIC MAGAZINE
DBH 4 students are learning how to make appropriate questions in English, using the most suitable WH pronoun and ordering the elements correctly.
If you want to revise the theory on WH questions and WORD ORDER, click here.
For practising a little bit more, here you have some exercises on this issue:
Hi guys!
I'm afraid I can't be here today so I want you to work on several things:
If you didn't finish the previous activity, that is, finding 4 events that happened on the day you were born from a list (www.datesinhistory.com), do it. Remember you have to extend and enlarge that information from wikipedia, or google or wherever. Bring that information printed for next day, as we are going to use it in class.
In this term, we need to work and reinforce several grammar points which are going to be useful for our project: revision of verb tenses, WH questions and word order. Have a look at the theory on verd tenses and do the following exercise.
Although students from our ikastola have a nice level of English in DBH4, we think they can improve quite a lot concerning pronunciation and intonation, so that they can sound more natural when speaking English.
That's why we are going to work a little bit on PHONETICS. But why is phonetics important? have a look at this video:
The idea is to learn about English sounds, practice them, and as an end to the project, work on a sketch by the Monty Python called "The Bathroom Door", where they can show everything they have learned on the topic. Do you like the idea?
We are going to concentrate basically on consonants, as vowels are a bit more complicated for us (in Basque we only have got 5 vowel sounds, whereas in English they have 12!). Anyway, if you want to know a bit more about them, here is a chart which shows the position of each of them in our tongue.
Have you heard of Newsinlevels.com? It's a fantastic site that publishes news for students of English everyday. The news can be read in 3 different levels, the third of which provides the video of the news too. If you devote ten minutes to reading / watching the news everyday, your English will surely improve!!!
Batx 1 students are learning how to write stories and they have developed some wonderful ones for us to enjoy. In fact, they are going to LH6 to tell them the stories they have written. Have a look at them!
Inside the project "What happened on your birthday?", you have to write and record a discussion. Well, in order to do that correctly, here you have some advice:
It has to sound natural, all the members of the group have to talk more or less the same.
When you explain the event you have chosen to the others, do not take too long, give them a rough description of what happenned and do not explain all of them one after the other.
Use a big variaty of formulas (all types), abuse of them, remember that English people are more polite than us when talking!
Try to sound English! Exagerate! Careful with the /r/(strong), /j/, /y/ ... these are not English sounds!
Contextualise the recording. Who are you? Where are you? What is the point of meeting your friends?
Once you reach an agreement, finish it properly. Take the contextualization into account.
Concerning the technique, use sound effects, if you can. (It makes the discussion sound "real")
Record your discussion using "Audacity", a programme for editing audio. It's easy to use it, and you can download it free from google. If you click on it, a tutorial will explain you how to use it.
Convert it into an mp3.
Send it by e-mail to your English teacher, or, create a docs document and share it with her.
Here you have some of the discussions that students of your age recorded in previous years. Listen to them, they may help you a lot (learn form the good and not so good models)!
Following with the analysis of different texts that describe what happened on the 29th May, we have this one about one of the biggest tragedies that have ever happened in football. Have a look at this video. It's technichally poor, but the images are worth being watched.
It is not the biggest tragedy that overtook in football. Some years
later, in Hillsborough, in 1989, 96 people died. Although the British
press blamed on football hooligans, the truth is that the the stadium
was already crowded and the authorities opened the doors to let hundreds
of people that were waiting outside get in.
After this, stronger measures were taken in order to avoid such things.
This is the third text we are analysing, conected with the events that happened on the 29th May.
"White Christmas" became a hit in the voice of Bing Crosby. Let's listen to it!
Do you know if any famous actor / actress from Hollywood was born just the same day as you? Maybe you share the same birthday with Usain Bolt, or the Queen of England. Can you imagine?
DBH 4 students are working on What happened when I was born? a project where they search for interesting events that happened in the past but just the same they were born, events that probably meant a big step forward to humankind, or backwards ...
For that they have to search through dates in history, a webpage where they are going to find a long list of interesting events that took place the same day they were born!
They also have to enlarge the brief information they find and look for more. They will face a variety of texts types that we will develop in class.
As an example, we have already analysed one, which refers to "The Empress of Ireland", a vessel that sank and
caused a bigger tragedy than the Titanic one.
Here you have a video
that explains what happened and gives you some information about that
time.
The soundtrack of this video belongs to the song "Sleeping Sun" by
Nightwish. While you watch the video (or after, in a revision), try to
get the words that are missing to complete the lyrics of the song
clicking on the following
exercise. In order to have no problems, you should open 2 windows at the same time (the video on the one hand, and the exercise)
DBH4 students are right now facing their new project: A MUSIC MAGAZINE. The idea is to design a lively, colourful and full of interesting content magazine. For that we have created a site with instructions, tasks, necessary grammar point to develop the task and so on. We'll try to combine everything with ICTs and we hope we can publish students' productions online quite soon.
Our last year DBH4 students made a MUSIC MAGAZINE where they used linguistic structures & devices learned along the course. As well as relative clauses, reported speech, conditionals and other grammar points. Students also made different types of writings, such as articles, reports, interviews, letters ...either individually or in groups.
Here are the results, we hope you enjoy them!
After some delays, the Education department from the Basque Government has released the lists of those candidates that have been given a grant to study abroad. Follow the link to know if you are one of the lucky ones!
Here you have some videos that give you more information on the space shuttle. The first one, for example, talks about the life inside the spacecraft. Have a look at it and do the following listening activity (Laura's students) and listening activity (Helena's students) (it would be very useful to have 2 lids opened at the same time (the video and the exercise)
