1.en.18 American and British English: walking around the city

During today’s walk,  we’ll cross the road using pedestrian crossings and walk on the pavement…

or rather use crosswalks and walk on the sidewalk

Well it all depends whether you use American or British English. Today, as Taylor shall be with us we’ll walk on the sidewalk!

Yesterday we discovered that Taylor is also a Beatles’s fan  and she joined us singing Penny Lane. Today she will join us on our city walk in Santa Catalina and in our visit to the museum.  Thanks to Taylor our pronunciation will improve a lot and we shall discover new ways of saying things. Today Taylor told us that Zebra crossings in the USA are calledcrosswalks, don’t you remember?

What do you think about this creative crosswalk from New York? Nice, isn’t it?

Well there are other differences.

American: sidewalk, elevator, trash

British: pavement, lift, rubbish

If you want to learn more, go to this site and you will find out how American and English call the same things with different words.

Homework: Thursday 28th. Look for a word and post it to the blog.You must also copy it in your notebook.

http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/blbritam.htm

1.en.10 Our city: on line activities to build up vocabulary (1)

Hi everyone,

During our first week together we went on a walk to the Town Hall to visit the Town Hall library. This was the first of a series of outings. In this first term we shall be CITY EXPLORERS and learn and investigate lots of new things about Palma.

Next Thursday we’ll go with Bernat for a walk , so remember the rules for outings and respect street signs.

Are you familiar with street signs?

Pedestrian Crossing or Zebra Crossing? Both are correct.

Images help us remember words. Do you like this one?

.

On our outings, we are going to observe how people move in our city. While we walk we can check if there are lots of cyclists using  bicycle lanes, or if the traffic is heavy.

In English we are going to do the following things:

• zoom in and out city life.
• use compass points to locate landmarks on a map
• learn more vocabulary to talk about the things we find when we walk around the town
• describe buildings, streets and city life
• give and ask directions
• find our way using a street plan
• compare different cities, streets and neighbourhoods
• identify landmarks and most popular citysights

To help you talk and write about your city I looked for  funny and varied on-line activities.

Homework. for Tuesday the 26th October

You have  almost three weeks to  do all of them and write down in your notebook the new words you learn. When you do an activity you like, post your comments to the blog.

This is the first set of on-line activities about city life posted in the blog. After doing the activities, I need your feed back. Post your comments to these questions

• Did you learn new words?
• Is it helpful to have audio to learn pronunciation?
• Did you find them difficult or easy?
• Which ones did you prefer?
• How long did it take you to do all of them?
• Would you like to have more on-line activities grouped by topic on the blog?
• Thank you for your feedback!

1.  Practice pronunciation of some basic city words

http://www.languageguide.org/im/city/eng/

2.  Listening:  town directions

http://www.elllo.org/yeartwo/feb7th/directions.htm

3.  Find your way in an American town and check the prepositions of place.

http://home.nordnet.fr/~rmaufroid/pupitre/townandplaces/intownmap.htm

4.  Read this text about Springfield, Bart’s hometown and do the fill in the gaps exercise

http://home.nordnet.fr/~rmaufroid/pupitre/townandplaces/thesimpsons.htm

5.  From an American city, to a typical English High Street. There are six different exercises in this address (reading, writing, and listening)  with plenty of vocabulary.

http://www.quia.com/cz/228104.html

6.  Listen to a person giving directions in Barcelona and do the exercises.

http://www.angles365.com/classroom/extra/3co04.swf