Third person simple present and present continuous

First and second years
The last two lessons of the year this week of teaching...I decided to go for the absolute basics, because that's where the trouble is.
To start out I drew a butterfly on the board and asked the ss "what is this", there reply: "butterfly", I scolded them roundly for not answering in a complete sentence, and managed to get them to come up with, "that is a butterfly" after a bit of mumbled discussion among the desks. Then I asked, "what does a butterfly do?", fully expecting, "he fly", or "butterfly fly", but they were right on and gave me, "a butterfly flies".
I had them come up to the board as well and they all drew a picture and we practiced this language.
The second years watched the Matty Goldberg video afterwards and we discussed that and I tried to get them to use present continuous, but it seemed a bit forced.
The first years watched part of Watership Downs
I also used exercises from Raymond Murphy Chapter 1 and 2 to fill in the extra time...Goodbye welcome good ol' summer time!

My last class with this group of first year students, so we watched this little video about count and uncount nouns, and did this as a fill in worksheet where students had to put in the proper article.  I think they are actually learning something!

More about Rosa

I want to use the video from here to discuss online dating with my group next week.
This page has good material on this subject as well.
http://www.eslpartyland.com/students/nov/dating.htm
Well, today we did a lesson about dating, I had the students learn the same expressions about expressing opinions as we did here.  Then we went over some of the discussion questions from Conversation Inspirations, a great book and good for getting students talking.
I had forgotten to bring the Rosa video, but we'll use it another time!

Definite Language in Mind

My last several lessons have been rather sloppy without a real goal of what language I'm trying to teach the students.  With that in mind I'm going to use the mobile phone etiquette lesson again but try to teach this language as well.  I may make some cards with the phrases on them and have the students use their phrases as they answer the questions in practice speaking.

Also for more activity this as a fill-in is also on hand.

Catching up post

The end of the year is upon us, and I've got some blogging to do...why do I do this to myself?
On May 17th, while Norwegians were celebrating independence day, I saw my 4th year students for perhaps the last time. I gave them the info for taking the quiz on line. The results of this quiz will show their progress and if they've learned anything about articles.

Zipcar lesson

Group IM43 and I went over our quiz today, just the part about zipcar, we saw this video after going over the fill in the blanks from the USA TODAY article.  
The exercise was to practice the English article.

Friday the 14th

Today with my first group: IM 21, second year students, we talked about cell phone manners, I found a nice questionnaire for discussion which my group seemed to enjoy.  Then I wanted to play a video, but my browser downloaded the wrong one which was absolutely inappropriate for my group, so we ended up doing a worksheet on non count nouns instead.  Glad for backup material in case plan A doesn't work!

talking about mothers and daughters

This video
was a good jumping off point for a discussion about the internet and relationships. I also wrote out the script without articles to give them as homework.
This lesson worked well with the Wednesday the 5th group as well as on the 7th with my Friday 2nd year students

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