BBC World News Podcast for Children.

Hi! It’s been a long time since my last post. I’m sorry but I’ve been quite busy. I’ll try to update more often from now on. At the moment I’m teaching online because schools are close here in Argentina due to the swine flue. For that reason, I will have more time to spend in front of the computer.

Well, let’s go to the important thing.  The bbc has created a great and extremely accurate podcast about breaking news. It is a great tool we can use for practising listening with our kids, teens and why not, with our adult students too. It consists of a 4 minute weekday news bulletin for 7-14 year olds.  The accompanying scripts are available on the BBC World Class website. Hope you find it useful.  See you soon.

Lesson Plan: World Financial Crisis

If you haven’t heard recently about the financial crisis, you are definitely not living in the Earth planet. Every newspaper, magazine, television programme and the like is dealing with this issue. Everybody seems to be an expert in economy nowadays, or at least they would like to be. As our classes do take place in this planet, why not take this popular topic to the classroom? There are plenty of articles, videos and recordings about it somewhere there on the net. There are even lesson plans! For example, if you have students from higher levels a good option would be this ready-made lesson plan from In Company website.

However, it is very difficult to find an article suitable for lower levels. After surfing the net for a long time, I have finally discovered one written by CBBC Newsround and prepared with it a lesson plan: cash_crisis. It deals with the current world financial crisis using very simple language making it accesible for language learners. It is also a good revision of verbs related to money.

Hope you enjoy it and don’t forget to leave as a comment if you happen to use the lesson plan or if you have more ideas to deal with the topic.

Playing With Current News

Are you bored of dicussing current news with your students always in the same way? Finding a piece of news in a newspaper, True or False, questions, vocabulary work and personal reactions to the text seem to be the only way available. However, there is more to it than just that. Having a look at Larry Ferlazzo’s blog I have found another online jewel for teaching English. It is a game called Play the News, with which you will be able to have some fun with your students while working on the well-known “current affairs topic”.

Play the News is an interactive game based on current news. You are given some background information and you can watch some videos in order to get informed for the game. Then, you are asked to choose a role to voice your opinion on the subject. Finally, you are given the possibility of predicting what is going to happen in the real world. To be able to play you have to register for free.

I believe it will become a great tool in most of my Business Classes and in some General English classes too. What do you think about it? What are the possibilities that this game has to offer? As always, please if you use it, share your experience with us.