Lexiophiles Top 100 Language Blogs 2010

 

I suppose I ought to be honoured to be ranked among older and more professional blogs from all over the world, especially when this blog isn't yet one year old, but I can't help feel I've let all those who have taken time to vote for me down. I'd like to thank all these people again. Don't worry - we'll try again next year! Meanwhile, I'll try to carry on improving this blog, to carry on finding ways to help you learn this wonderful language called English, while having fun at the same time.

THANK YOU!

CLIL Survey School Year 2009-2010

Updated: 27 May 21:15 GMT

I've modified a couple of questions in the survey: I changed the last question to 'Which class do you belong to?'  and inserted a checkbox question 'Select your school'. This will make it easier if you are just interested in seeing your school's replies (possible only if you're viewing the spreadsheet). Go to VIEW on the menu bar and select LIST VIEW. In this mode, you can select whatever you're interested in. For example, if you're only interested in IES Alonso Quesada, scroll onto the column SELECT YOUR SCHOOL, choose IES Alonso Quesada, and the spreadsheet will only display the results where this has been the selection.

Since, I've just made the change, surveys taken before this (see date/time above) will not have the last question reflected.

Well, unfortunately, the time has come for me to say goodbye to you all. Of course, I would have liked to stay until the end of the school year, but the decision wasn't mine to take.

With any luck, I will be back again with you next school year. I hope you will keep coming back to this blog in the summer, if only to say hello to me!

Please take 5 minutes of your time to complete this survey. You might have done one with your respective schools, but this is for me. As I'm a strong advocate for a paperless society, mine is online, and the results of the survey can be seen by everyone.

There are 4 sections; no question, except one, is compulsory. If the question doesn't apply to you, leave it blank. You can give your name, or you can remain anonymous. The only information that you must give is the name of your school and your class.

Thank you!

Although this survey has been designed by myself for myself, everyone is welcomed to do it. Just leave the questions that don't apply to you blank.

After completing the survey, you can see the results of the survey. If you want to see them directly, here are the links:

See the analytics.

See the spreadsheet.

Oh, incidentally, if you aren't able to see the analytics on Mozilla Firefox, try Internet Explorer or Google Chrome.

Lexiophiles cLiMBing in Oxford

Well, voting for the Lexiophiles Top 100 is now closed. Now, we're in the hands of jury. Today, I found out that acLiLtocLiMB has been listed among Oxford University Press' favourite teaching blogs! What an honour!

Lexiophiles Top 100: acLiLtocLiMB needs YOUR vote!

LATEST UPDATE: C'mon folks! Final day of voting left for the Lexiophiles Top 100 Blogs for 2010! This is your final chance! Get your whole school into the computer lab and vote! For me, I hope! ;-P The dark horse has become the front runner: the Brazilians are set to win this stage of the competition. The Koreans have made a last minute comeback and have relegated acLiLtocLiMB to 3rd place.  The Spanish's only chance of having a representative in the top three lies with a Clil to Climb. So, are you proud to be Spanish?

Many thanks go to those who have taken time to vote this blog; for those who didn't think the blog was good enough for their vote, well, too bad! Just three clicks is all that is needed. Simply click on the image above,  which will open a new tab/window, then click on the little circle beside a CLIL to Climb, which is 2nd on the list. Scroll down till near the bottom until you see the word VOTE. Click it.

It's one vote per person. So, if there are six in your family, there are potentially six votes, and if there's a thousand in your school that's a potential 1,000 votes! How it is all controlled, I'm not sure, really.

Blogs will be ranked based on user votes (50%) and the Lexiophiles ranking criteria (50%). Results will be announced on 28th May.

Your vote is important!

Thank you!

How to Draw Cartoons - Basic Instructions and Worksheet

Last updated: 2 Nov 2010

This presentation can be seen better here:
http://aclil2climb.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-to-draw-cartoons-in-authorstream.html

With the help of José Alberto of IES Los Tarahales, I've come up with this PowerPoint presentation and worksheet which will help initiate students into the world of cartoon art.

There are four exercises, the first of which guides the student in making a character out of a stick figure in four steps. In the worksheet, the student is expected to draw each step separately, in order to make sure they understand the methodology. The teacher could, while presenting the PowerPoint, himself follow the steps and draw on the board while the students draw on their worksheet.

The second exercise uses the same concepts, but now the student draws a running figure, each step superimposing on the previous.

The third and fourth involves the use of their imagination. Ask someone to doodle something on the board. The teacher converts this into something more meaningful, e.g. a man, an animal, etc. Do this a few times before asking volunteers to come up to the board to do it. This is a fun activity, and they will love it!

In the fourth exercise, they try to animate geometric figures, such as a box, an oval, etc.

As usual, both the presentation and the worksheet are available from Scribd and Slideshare. Please be aware that this presentation needs to be downloaded and played as a presentation for it to make sense. What you see below is just a preview.

How to draw cartoon characters - Basic Instructions

View more presentations from Chiew Pang.

How to Draw Cartoons - Worksheet

Past Simple 3 Quiz (Questions)

Here's another quiz for you to practise your simple past tense, but this time, it's focussed on questions. Remember that the correct answer is always given; so if you get it wrong, try to understand your error and keep on doing the quiz!

Teachers, please note that if students provide a valid email, the results will be automatically sent to it.

Opinion Harven School Las Palmas

As I was browsing through today's visitor's statistics, like I often do, I was curious to find one had come in here on a Google search for "opinion harven school las palmas". Hehehe. He was directed to: http://acliltoclimb.blogspot.com/2009/10/countries-and-nationality-elementary.html

Date: 19 May 2010. Time: about 16:20

Well, if that person reads this and is still searching for that information, feel free to email me! ;-P

Colour Wheel: Mixing Primary & Secondary Colours

The colours most widely known as the primary colours are red, green and blue. These are used, for example, in CRT displays, to make a wide range of other colours. In pigments and dye mixing, such as printing, however, the primary colours used are cyan, magenta and yellow.

Mixing any two primary colours gives you a secondary colour: cyan + magenta = violet; cyan + yellow = green; and magenta + yellow = red.

In theory, mixing all three of these primary colours will give greyish black, but in practice, they tend to produce brownish colours. For this reason, in printing, black is also used and not only for the quality, but also mixing three colours uses more ink and takes longer to dry.

Mixing a primary colour with a secondary colour gives a tertiary colour, for example, cyan-violet  or yellow-green.

In this worksheet, the objective is for students to mix the primary colours to obtain the secondaries. Ensure that they do not mix the pigments directly on the paper! They will have to mix them on a tray (or equivalent) first, and then transfer them onto the worksheet.

Please see this other post, too.

Later, after they have succeeded in making the secondary colours, they will prepare a wheel of 12 colours (3 primary + 3 secondary + 6 tertiary colours).

This worksheet is also available in Scribd. For examples of students' work on the colour wheel, see here.

Colour Wheel: Mixing Colours

View More Presentations from Chiew Pang.

Most of the credit for the worksheet goes to José Alberto.

Houses, Rooms and Furniture: Vocabulary Game

Two games here to revise the types of houses, the types of rooms, and some furniture. When you finish each game, please come back here to comment on your score (the percentage and the time). Try to remember your mistakes and keep doing the activity until you get 100% in the quickest time possible.

You may also like the objects around the house series:

Bathroom Objects
Bedroom Objects
Living Room Objects

Countable & Uncountable Nouns (Food) Game

Here's a little game to revise countable and uncountable food nouns. All you need to do is to drag the item either to the countables dustbin or the uncountables dustbin. Click on the icon to begin.

Earth's Atmosphere - Quiz

Are we in the troposphere or the stratosphere? Where do spaceships fly? How thick is the Earth's atmosphere? Check out your knowledge of the Earth's atmosphere in this entertaining quiz. Click on the image to begin.

Teachers, please note that if an email is provided, a review of the quiz is sent to it automatically.

Examples of students' work in art: symmetry, colours, textures, proportions

This lot has been produced by 1ºA of IES Los Tarahales, and include samples of work on symmetry, colours, textures and proportions. This class is not directly involved in the CLIL programme,  and I only started spending time with them a few weeks ago. It is indeed a shame that they couldn't have the same opportunity as the others because they have certainly demonstrated more than enough interest.

Slides scanned and uploaded by José Alberto.

Textures & Patterns: Student's work

Those of you who have downloaded the textures presentation would have seen an example of the proposed activity on Picasso's Guernica at the end. Here, you will see the rest of the work of 1ºB, IES Los Tarahales.

Geometry in Art: Symbols and Lines

Last updated: 2 Nov 2010
Try an online game here:
http://aclil2climb.blogspot.com/2010/11/geometry-in-art-lines-game.html

Mathematicians are artists and artists sometimes need to be mathematicians, too! Here, we present (my thanks goes to the cooperation of José Alberto of IES Los Tarahales, who did most of the work, really) some common basic expressions.

The file is, as usual, available in Scribd and SlideShare.

How can you use it? One way is to cut them up along the lines so that you end up with a pile of diagrams and another of descriptions. You can either mix them up or leave them as two separate piles. The idea then is to have a student pick one up at random, and draw the diagram on the board, if he gets a description, or if he gets the diagram, to say the name of it.

Another activity is for the students to work in pairs or in groups. Each group is given a set of the cut-up squares. They then have to match the descriptions to the diagrams. The group which is the first to get all correct is the winner. You can reward them or set a forfeit for the slowest group.

Or you can play the ever popular Bingo! Look at my post on Instant Bingo for instructions on an alternative method.

Geometry in Art: Symbols and Lines

Past Simple Quiz 2

An easy past simple quiz to help you with your revision. Remember that the correct answer is always given; so if you get it wrong, try to understand your error and keep on doing the quiz!

Faces: Drawing Basic Expressions

Further to the post on how to draw a face, we now learn how to draw basic facial expressions, inspired by the styles of cartoonists. First, watch the presentation, then practise on the worksheet.

As usual, you can download these from Slideshare (.ppsx) or Scribd: PowerPoint (.pps) and worksheet.

Faces: Drawing Basic Expressions

View More Presentations from Chiew Pang.

Faces: Basic Expressions Worksheet

View More Presentations from Chiew Pang.

Textures and Patterns

Last updated: 02 Nov 2010
This presentation can now be seen better here:
http://aclil2climb.blogspot.com/2010/11/patterns-and-textures-now-in.html

A picture paints a thousand words, a good picture, that is. I don't know if this presentation will be judged as good, but it contains a fair number of wonderful pictures to illustrate the world of textures and patterns. Be warned: this PowerPoint presentation is rather big (21 MB), but I hope you will agree that it's worth it.

As usual, the presentation is available in both SlideShare (.ppsx) and Scribd (.pps)

Textures and Patterns

View More Presentations from Chiew Pang.

CLIL Trekking From Tejeda to Lanzarote, Valleseco

Friday. End of April. School X (I'm not supposed to use this school's name - can you beat that?). 2º ESO, CLIL group. Both their English teacher and their Science teacher were away at a Comenius meeting in Turkey. Weather wasn't too hot, not too cold either. Sounds like a good idea to go trekking, and so we did!

It was a fairly easy and gentle route. We started out at Tejeda, and walked towards Valleseco. Unfortunately, towards the end of the trek, they were starting to block the roads for the rally - we hadn't known it before - so we had to cut the route slightly, and stopped at Lanzarote. Mind you, some of the kids were more than pleased! Tut, tut! No stamina, these kids!

I've tried not to publish any photos with faces - there seems to be a paranoia going on here these days, something I don't quite understand as you can see the same kids publishing their photos (and some rather provocative, I might add) in the social network sites, and here I am, under pressure not to upload any photos of them!

The Earth: Rocks and Minerals

19 May 2010: This has to be amended ... Chiew

Teachers, please take note: some of my quizzes, like this one, for example, ask for an email. If an email is provided, the results will be sent automatically to it. This allows you to grade/check your students' progress. If you haven't got an email for this purpose, I'd suggest creating one for this purpose, and ask the students to provide that email in the quiz.

Click on image to begin 100-piece Grand Canyon Jigsaw Puzzle

Past Simple Quiz (Elementary); Theme: Explorers

Teachers, please take note: some of my quizzes, like this one, for example, ask for an email. If an email is provided, the results will be sent automatically to it. This allows you to grade/check your students' progress. If you haven't got an email for this purpose, I'd suggest creating one for this purpose, and ask the students to provide that email in the quiz.