Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

I stumbled on this awesome animated music video about a shy man named Mr. Morton , which is trying to focus on subjects and predicates, but does a really nice job with past tense verbs too. My students found it funny and useful to listen to and re-tell. Here's another nice one that's more of a pattern chant. For the different pronunciations of -ed in regular past tense verbs, here's a nice list . For irregular past tense verbs, I like giving a fairly complete alphabetical list and then shorter lists grouped by patterns . That's all for now!  Have a great day!

I'm a big fan of songs for learning in general.  You can learn vocabulary, phrases, rhythm, slang, grammar, and so much more!  Here are a few songs that one of my classes listened to and sang a long with last week.  Yes, they're for children, but they're still useful! Vowel Spelling and pronunciation song (short and long vowels!) Head Shoulders Knees and Toes Health Vocabulary I'll add more as I find them! Will

Lou Rawls performed this popular classic using modals in the past .  His title "If I Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda" uses an informal contraction for "If I could have (done something), I should have (done it), I would have (done it)."  He is using the modals in the past to talk about the regret when someone realizes that they have made a mistake but it is too late. This popular song by Cheap Trick uses infinitives patterns and verbs in the past tense in an interesting way.  It also includes some  puns or jokes with the double meaning of words like "want." The lyrics to this Smokey Robinson and the Miracles song are very simple, but they include a nice use of an idiomatic phrase "get a hold on someone"... They use it in kind of a unique way, that seems to mean that the singer is very attached to his or her lover.   (Of course, this is different than to "get a hold of someone" which means to contact them, especially by phone.)  There are...

This past week, our methods class has been conducting lessons for each other in some fascinating contexts; I wanted to record some of the cool activities from my favorite groups (to quote Dr. Elaine Horwitz). Several of my favorite books used songs to integrate listening, reading, speaking, vocabulary, and grammar. Of course, this was a hit. Today we heard "Who wears short shorts" as part of an beginners' ESL lesson about clothing. The video they used was a wonderful old 1950s rock video, but the only one I can find is this short commercial for Nair . My favorite group used " Dos Gardenias " performed by Maria Rita for a beginning Spanish lesson on expressions of love. My other favorite group used Hi5 to appeal to small children. I had never heard of this show, but apparently it is popular with small children. My other favorite group did not use a song. They used a really cool game of Clue. I will link to Mieca's site and ask her to share the title...