Lisa Dee – Creator of the Equist™ Process and Founder of Vista Caballo Ranch

In our very inspiring conversation, Lisa shares the incredible story of how her Spiritual awakening transformed her from a very successful New York City entrepreneur to the founder of Vista Caballo and the Equist Process. She describes just how Vista Caballo can help you in your transformation to a life led by the heart and not just the mind.

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Kate Solisti – Internationally known speaker, author, pet nutrition & holistic healing counselor and animal communicator.

Kate sits down with Anna and Vin to  explain the many complementary therapies she uses in her healing work with the animals and the many tools she has in her “healing toolbelt”.

She also gives a thorough description of Bach Flower Remedies, how they work, their history, uses and effectiveness.  And she  describes one of Vin’s favorite of her tools, Pranamonics!

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Songs have so many uses in EFL, in my case it was selecting lyrics within the song and using them as a base for a lesson on the present continuous.

After having written out a rough lesson plan, I showed the lyrics to the song to my co-teacher. This is when the trouble started. After having thought about some of the lyrics referring to Sodom and Gomorrah, she said the song is too boring, and went on to suggest an alternative,  YMCA by the Village People.

Excuse me for trying to raise the bar here. Everytime we played the YMCA video I just couldn’t help thinking to myself, “they cannot be any more camp if they tried”. Still, they had a good run, and even put out a movie in the early 80’s. Which I got to see by the way. All I can remember of it though was the black guy climbing through someones window.

Traveling isn’t cheap, but there is a way to afford it if you are fluent in English and have patience; teach English abroad.  Granted, teaching English won’t make you rich, but if you have a desire to help others (and fund your wanderlust in the process) then this might be the job for you.

As an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher, your success of employment will depend on your teaching skills and amount of education.  The ideal requisites are:

• Fluency in English
• Four-year college degree
• Teaching certificate
• Commitment to living abroad for extended periods

Some of these requirements will vary depending on the country where you want to teach and the employment situation, but fluency in English is a must.  Following are some links to help you find out more:

SoYouWanna.com

The basics on teaching English abroad.

BridgeTEFL.com

One of the many places that offers teaching certification.  I’ve taken one of their courses and found it very helpful.

ESLCafe.com

A hub where English teachers can find jobs, share teaching experiences and network.

ESL.about.com

A helpful site of resources and lesson ideas for the English teacher.

For those of you who have to work tomorrow (like me)

http://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/english/2008/12/mr-beans-christmas-lesson.html

http://bogglesworldesl.com/christmas_cards.htm

A modern-day classic with Mr. Bean, and a nice little writing exercise.

That’s all.  Merry Christmas, ho ho ho!

As you all may know we have been nominated for the Edublog Awards 2009. We are very honoured because the blogs that have been nominated with us  were just  FANTASTIC! We would like to congratulate the winners for their great job. Even though we haven’t won, we are extremely happy for having taking part in the awards and also because we haven’t done that bad in the final results. We are in position 6th. A big thank to all those who have supported us: teachers, students, parents, friends and especially to Eduardo Peirano (@emapey) and Lorena Zanola (@enpatagoniasur) for their great motivation and hard work.

I have been in Spain almost 2 years, and there are several things I can´t stand about teaching English. Here they are: 1)The students. Spanish students are lazy, childish, disrespectful and just generally bad, bad students.Twenty minutes late to an hour class is standard, going out of the room to answer ´important business calls´, talking constantly in Spanish behind my back. Get a life people…seriously.

2)The academies. They pay you under the table, late, mysterious taxes cull large amounts of salary, they are unprofessional and disorganized. The sad thing is very many academies don´t give a damn about the teachers, they are looking to ride the TEFL bandwagon and make a quick buck.

3)Holidays make a stable salary all but impossible. As soon as the New Year rolls in the holidays begin, Semana Santa, local holidays in Madrid. And of course you don´t get paid.

4)Companies cutting classes. I can´t even keep track of the classes I started only to have them cancelled a week or month later, because the companies had to cut costs.

5)The security desk in the companies. I have never come across people who move more slowly than the security personnel of big companies. They seem stuck on slo mo. I can´t count the number of times I arrive for a new class and they have no idea who the students are, where the class will be or who I am.

6)Month end. When will your paycheck arrive? Between the third and the fifth of the month or later? Who knows, this is Spain, just relax, take it easy, fiesta. Of course I don´t have rent to pay or any costs at month end, why would I want my money on time?

7)Admin. This one kills me. The barrage of books I have to cart around to classes, workbooks, teachers books, students books, people changing classes without notice, people suddenly and mysteriously arriving two weeks into the course, frantic phonecalls from academy co-ordinators up to five times a day.The stupid tracking control sheets and signature sheets.

The jokey, pasalo bien atmosphere in every class. I have to say, I have studied languages, French, Afrikaans, Spanish and German. Nowhere have I come across pupils who expect that by sitting in class for an hour twice I week, that they will be able to speak fluent English.

9)The horrible accents and cringeworthy mistakes.People is nice in eSpain! Football is funny! I went to the bitch yesterday. Rape is the shit. Grarahrahghhh. These mistakes coming from upper intermediate and advanced students. Or students who lived five years in Ireland or England. Or students who have been studying English for twenty years! Or students with English native spouses or significant others.

10)Me. For being so naive. For treating every class for the first six months in Spain with PROFESSIONALISM. Loving tailoring my classes to the needs of my students, with the perfect blend of listening, reading, writing and speaking. Really putting myself in their shoes.Spending hours on the Internet carefully looking for interesting articles with examples of lively grammar, useful nouns and adjectives and handy colloquial expressions. Then realising that it was ALL in vain.

I should have done what many other teachers do, go to class on the first of the month, get all the students to sign for the month and have a holiday! Or say that I am a freelance teacher, get paid a hefty amount more and never declare taxes. Or how about taking jobs with five different academies at the start of the year to see which ones work out for me, leaving the others to fall by the wayside by just never again pitching up for class? Clearly I am a numbskull.

My school was proud me. Enough so, that the Princiapl awarded the hubcap to me, again, in a mock ceremony at a staff meeting.

Al, also got a shot of me. Taking a photo of my award in the hotel room. He was doing it too, so I sort of followed suit. For once the Paparazzi gets photographed.

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

About a year ago, Andreas Müller-Hartmann (Heidelberg University of Education, Germany) gave a keynote speech at a regional DGFF-conference at the University of Wuppertal, Germany (November 28, 2008) in which he focused on the role of tasks in target language skills development and in promoting intercultural communicative competence. The audio podcast (in German) is available here.

I actually said yes to going to the workshop conference. It meant time off going to class and a free trip to Seoul. The downside was that most of the conference ran over into the Saturday. But there were upsides, I got to meet up with Al again after quite along time, and also I was awarded, (along with 25 or so other people with time in Korea, totalling over 3 years) an award. It was very nice, I likened it to car hubcap mounted onto a wooden shield.

The timetable for the conference was gruesome to behold. Lectures on cultural differences being taught by a fictional mass murderer, comedy skit show put on by volunteer native teachers, and a trip to see ‘Jump’, a Korean drama based around a martial art medium. Al, had decided to jump from seeing ‘Jump’, and instead had had some donner kebabs. A timely decision.

But what I was really hanging on for was the trip to Namsan tower. Perhaps the highest point in Seoul offering the best vista.

Nope. Even that was dissappointing. The long awaited photo-shoot up Namsan tower run aground on the account of Seoul air quality.

I have to say that I left the conference (with the remaining HobNobs in my backpack) feeling less intelligent than when I went in. Even without the cursary lecture (the veteran teachers were excused), it was a brain-sapping exercise.

Oh boy! I am going to write a lengthy post on this one…check it out in the next few days.

You didn't think your students were reading, did you?

As promised, the list of songs I used in my History of English Language Popular Music Elective (HELP-ME) class is below.  The class was taught over 20 days in 5 weeks with each week devoted to a different decade of popular music.  We covered one song per day usually beginning with watching a video of the song, examining the lyrics and something linguistically relevant (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.), talking about the meaning of the song, and then listening to the song again and singing along.

A much more exhaustive (and exhausting!) resource is available as a Google Docs Spreadsheet.  The spreadsheet also contains several songs I considered but didn’t use.  Each entry has the song title, the artist, the year it was released, the genre, information about it’s popularity (#1 for four weeks, for example) as well as links to the lyrics, video, and Wikipedia articles on both the song and the artist.  I also have my notes on relevant or ESL-appropriate features of each song.

I delivered all of this information to students using Moodle, an open-source online course management system.  I hoped to present as much information for students to explore as I could and several students took advantage of this opportunity by logging in and exploring many of these resources.  They were also able to listen to each of the songs via our streaming server.  (Simply giving them the .mp3 files would have created copyright issues.)

Overall, the class was very well received for it’s novel approach and interesting subject.  I included a wide variety of musical genres so that no student would have to suffer through a prolonged period of country or R&B.  Students also appreciated touching on grammar points and new vocabulary words in the more relaxed context of an elective class.  They were exposed to more English without having to worry about a final exam.

If I were to teach the class again, I would probably eliminate a couple of the longer songs, or at least find a way to devote more time to them.  The class really enjoyed Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) and Parents Just Don’t Understand, for example, but we had to rush through them a bit in order to completely cover the lyrics.  In fact, I would like to teach this class every quarter, and could by changing up the songs so that they wouldn’t be repeated if students take the class in back-to-back quarters.  The class included students from all five levels in our program and I worked hard to ensure that all students were able to gain something from the class.  According to my student evaluations, I was successful.

In the table below, the names of the songs are linked to the lyrics (on sing365.com) and the artist names are linked to their page on Wikipedia.  As I mentioned above, you can view more information at the Google Docs Spreadsheet.

We are very honoured because we have been nominated for the best class blog in the Edublog Awards 2009.

There are lots of excellent blogs nominated with us. You may have a look at all of them here. Select your favorite class blog from the list  and click Vote OR scroll down the page to check out all blogs nominated in this category!

A big thank to all those who have motivated us to start and continue with this blog, and especially to Eduardo Peirano (@emapey), who was the person who nominated us for the contest. Classes have ended here in Argentina so we will continue working in this blog with the students in March, after a reinvigorating summer holiday. We all deserve it!

Another great week at the preschool. The children really seem to be enjoying it.

• In the 3rd year class we learnt words about the weather, sang, counted, remembered animal names and practised our colours.
• In the 2nd year class we sang our learnt songs and learnt a new one, I can sing a rainbow. We counted from 1 to 10 and from 10 to 1, and we learnt some animal names.

This week was a very productive one for the 4th and 5th classes and a busy one for the 2nd and 3rd.

• In the 5th class we started the unit entitled Present Simple. We have actually been learning the present simple tense since we started, but this unit will expand on it greatly. At the end of the class we watched 10 minutes of Harry Potter.
• In the 4th class we finished the bedroom unit by writing sentences about our belongings and began another unit called My house.
• The 2nd and 3rd class was a busy one. We learnt about the weather and drew some related pictures. We ended the class with a conversation circle.

自分が作った英語ワークシートをどんどんホームページに載せたいと思います。まずは5枚だけですが、
無料なので気軽にダウンロードして、英語をチャレンジしてみてください。

ワークシートは こちらへ

During our sixth session this is what we did.

• In the 3rd year class we sang, we practised our colours, counted and learned some phrases to describe the weather.
• In the 2nd year class we practised naming parts of our body, we counted to ten and counted down from ten, and we sang Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, and we learnt a new song entitled Good Morning to You.

Over the last two weeks the 5th and 4th classes have concentrated on reading and completing the exercises of the first edition of our Kids’ News magazine. They have loved it and are eagerly awaiting to begin the December-March edition. We completed a unit dedicated to Autumn.

Over the past two weeks we have only had one lesson for the 2nd and 3rd class. In it we finished off the Autumn unit which we had already started.

Can’t be bothered to read the post – Click here for the lesson on Writing Cards http://chrisspeck.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/writing-cards1.doc

Sending cards is an enourmous business in the UK and the USA with the average person spending way too much time and money on them. There’s also a lot of social pressure to send and receive them especially at Christmas time. Who hasn’t been presented with a card for someone who is leaving the office, sick or getting married, and thought ‘Idon’t know what to write!’?

It’s also pretty difficult for ESOL/EFL and second language English learners to write them to. I used this lesson with a group of pre- intermediate learners.

Here’s the lesson again http://chrisspeck.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/writing-cards1.doc

Here are the lesson stages

1. Ask the students to tell you when they last recieved a card of any description. Write a list of the cards they tell you about on the board. It might look something like this. Anniversary, wedding, congratulations, birthday, valentines, get well soon, sorry, condolences…

2. Now pass out the sheet and have the students correct the mistakes then match the card messages to the people they are for.

3. Now ask students to write their own messages in response to the prompts. You could ask them to work in pairs or alone and could check the answers by getting to write on the board.

4. There are some really good electronic greetings cards on the net. You might like to show these to your students if you have an interactive whiteboad or projector.

http://www.jacquielawson.com/ 

Simle Box

It was neat, it was tidy, but I still though that my after school kids could do better. Some of them actually did. Okay, two of the girls did. While the boys subsequently just wrapped coloured twine around the polystyrene tree.

After spending a whole morning (in between surfing hard on the PC) I decided it needed some  glitter. I did find glitter glue though, which was just as good. Actually, better. Yup, tiny things do please tiny minds.

Those engaged in developing their students’ intercultural communication skills may find Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent talk at TED most useful, especially when they deal with issues of otherization. Even if you’re not engaged in anything that comes close to otherization, I’d recommend watching this video. Adichie’s “The danger of a single story” is a must see!

Do you think Youtube is not appropriate for using in classrooms? Let me show you some ideas I came up with while browsing the website in question.

When I still was a pupil at school the media used by teachers in class were quite limited. Teachers could choose between cassettes, later even CDs, the overhead projector, the blackboard, and, if we were lucky, videos. Nowadays we may find a broad variety of all sorts of media presented on the internet being accessed easily. The one offering the most freely accessible video content is undoubtedly YouTube, providing its users with hundreds of millions of videos concerning all sorts of topics and interests. So, why not using it in classrooms? I came across some very interesting videos which I personally would use in my future classes.

To me, one of the most important reasons why I would use YouTube in my classes is that I am of the opinion that pupils would be very fond of the usage of that particular website by their teacher. Furthermore, I do believe that they would not expect you to use something such as YouTube for educational purposes. Moreover, you can address several of the pupil’s channels, e.g. combining audio and visual input, as well as fun. And is it not fun that motivates pupils to participate actively and that facilitates learning?

Now, let me show some of the ideas I had which YouTube videos I could/would use in my future classes:

Yes we can dear Mr. President!

In the 9th grade of the German Gymnasium talking about the political life in the USA in of the options teachers have in how to organise their lessons. Why not starting the lesson with two YouTube videos?

The first one is one of the American singer Pink’s most well-known songs: Dear Mr. President. This song concerns political issues that were prominent during  George W. Bush’s term of office. In her song, Pink addresses social injustices in the US, e.g. poverty and/or the equality of homosexuals.

The second one is the video of Barack Obama’s famous speech “YES WE CAN” which he gave during his presidential campaign. The speech was turned into a song by will.i.am, famous member of the Black Eyed Peas. The song was also honoured with the Emmy Award for New Approaches in Daytime Entertainment. Furthermore, the song features many other famous Hollywood stars and singers, which I think is another reason pupils could relate to this video.

After having watched both of the videos one option could be to contrast the differences and similarities in order to find an introduction to the topic. Of course, one should watch both videos at least two times to ensure that the pupils can grasp the meaning of the clips. Furthermore, the teacher should hand out printed versions of the lyrics after the first watching and talk about vocabulary necessary to help the pupils understand.

To my mind, using the videos can provide the teacher with the opportunity for a great introduction to the whole topic of contemporary American politics in general. Facilitating teaching, and sparing pupils from plain text.

Grammar is dead boring!

This is an opinion shared by many, especially by pupils that have to suffer from plain grammar explanations on the blackboard. Why not have your pupils explore grammar themselves and offer some sort of grammar workshop? Here one possibility could be to have a grammar project which could replace one or two exams by doing a video trying to explain a certain grammatical topic.

The video shown below gave me the idea to that project. It is concerned with a revision of German separable and inseparable verbs, being a rather complicated issue when it comes down to German grammar. The video was made for using it in a German as a Foreign Language classroom context.

Now, why not do something similar with your pupils?

You could, for instance, divide your class into groups of four to five pupils and give every group a certain grammatical topic to deal with, e.g. prepositions (in vs. at).

Of course you cannot demand your pupils to come up with a whole 10 minute video. I think that you should be satisfied with some pictures they have taken in order to explain and exemplify the grammatical problem, and add some self-spoken and recorded explanation to it. This should be no problem using the Windows Movie Maker or some other programme . What you expect the results to be, of course, depend on your pupils age, grade and their level of mastery of the language.

“I’d rather watch it in English!”

A couple of months ago I was talking to fourteen-year-old teenager. He told me that English was the subject he dislikes most at school. After I asked him why, he replied that all they did during the lessons was work with books. Coincidentally, we came to talk about his favourite TV series which turned out to be The Simpsons. In this context he told me that he watched The Simpsons in English only, for he thinks it was much funnier than in German. That made me think: why not have your pupils watch an episode of their favourite TV show in English for homework? Of course you want to be sure that they do as they are told. So, why not develop a questionnaire the pupils have to answer concerning this episode? For us as foreign language teachers that would provide us with the chance to have our pupils enhance their listening comprehension skills without even realising it, and, moreover, they would combine this activity with fun.

If you are not sure what you pupils’ favourite TV show is, go ahead and ask them. They might be somewhat surprised about that question but I am sure they will like what you will make out of it.

Some might claim that watching a whole episode of an English-speaking TV show might be too complicated for  pupils for they lack too many vocabulary. In some cases this might be true. The most important fact is, though, that they get what the episode is about, which they will understand only by watching it since the visual aspect supports the plot’s understanding.

Since I think that watching an episode of The Simpsons is a bit too demanding for most fourteen-year-old pupils, I decided to go for something more easy and funny: Spongebob Squarepants

Possible tasks and questions regarding this episode could be:

- Briefly summarise what happens during the episode.

- Why does Squidward decide to have his own TV show?

- What does the Guitar Lord not have?

- What is Spongebob’s and Patrick’s job at the show?

- What does Mr. Krab’s sign say that he is holding into the camera?

-…

Why watch your Pronunciation?!?

English pronunciation can give, especially German learners of English, a hard time. Teachers of EFL keep telling their pupils that they have to watch their pronunciation because otherwise they might say the complete opposite of what they intended to. As I remember from my own experience as a pupil, we treated the teacher’s wise words rather like “in one ear and out the other”. So, why not use YouTube to exemplify what you’re trying to say?

So, do you have any experience in using YouTube at school? Do you have any other ideas how to use it? Please feel free to comment…

Please note:

Dear readers,

please note that these are only ideas of what you could do when using YouTube. It does not make the claim to be complete or representative. Please note further that I am very well aware of the fact that not every pupil has access to the internet at home thus those, and other problems arising during the process of teaching when using YouTube, have to be dealt with individually.

I just take a closer look at some pages and blogs concerning the topic of new media and the possibilities of usage and came up with a very interesting blog by Nik Peachey who is a freelance learning technology consulter, a writer and a teacher trainer. He runs several websites with the topic of new technologies in the English classroom that features tips, resources and learning material for EFL and ESL teachers.

One of his blogs which I especially like is designed for autonomous ESL and EFL learners. It is called„ Nik’s Daily English Activities“ and gives ideas for simple activities and exercises which the learner can do on a daily basis. These activites can improve your English skills like pronounciation, listening comprehension or memorizing vocabulary just to mention a few. Beside this the learner get in contact with new technologies and new media in connection with learning the English language.

I really like the different activities because they are almost like little webquests because Nik uses websites with different tool or activites and designs his own tasks around these sites. I will give you an example how his activities work out by describing an activity that I like:

• Read and Write Very Short Stories: This one is an exercise where the learners are asked to write a short story based on five images. You can find these images on a site called Five Card Stories. Before starting to write their own stories the task for the learners is to read through several other stories on the website and then they are supposed to vote how good the story is according to their opinion. Through this they probably get some inspiration for their own writings and learn to give and receive feedback for written works.The next step is to write their own story to images or rewrite a story they have red using the same images. For writing the learner just need to fill in the title of the story, their nickname and their own version of the short story into a blank. After this they have to write two security words and then they can save their own version of a short story to the site. The learner can come back and see how other users like the story and voted for it! Additionally it is possible to create your own story by choosing images yourself. Go to the gallery of Five Card Stories and pick some pictures you like or find interesting. Then you can write your own story the same way already described before!

I really like this activity because on the one hand it is great for your students to improve their vocabulary and writing skills in a creative way and on the other hand this exercise does not necessarily need to be done on the internet. You can transfer these tasks easily to your classroom by just bringing different images and everyone can pick five of them according to one’s own interest and fantasy. After writing their stories they can put them somewhere in class and the other students can comment on their stories orally or through short comments on paper!

This is just one of the many differnt activites that the host of this blog offers for learners. As already mentioned most of the exercises are good hints and material for teachers as well and can be easily used in class. I really like this page and just can recommend it to you!