Entries from October 2005 ↓

Some people have been asking about how to find raw materials to use for writing lessons. Nice photos or other artwork go a long way to making materials look professional and appealing to students. I’m a horrible artist, so I have to copy. In the past, I used to use Google Image Search, but these days I use the Flickr photo sharing site to find photos that look good and are free to use.

Why are they free? Flickr makes it easy for photographers to license their photos for very liberal use and reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Try the Creative Commons Search Page on Flickr to find most anything you might need a photo of. You are pretty much free to copy, alter, and re-publish the photos (and there were a couple of million last time I looked) as long as you aren’t making money (and sometimes even if you are).

How can that work? Flickr has a very simple outline of your rights to use images under Creative Commons (CC). Or, if you really want to know the nitty-gritty, go direct to Creative Commons for more information.

By Premshree Pillai

By Snowy’s Good Things

By Slice

It took me all of a minute to find these three photgraphs, another minute to download them, but several minutes of cutting and pasting to give the authors due credit for their work. That’s the price of free photos that don’t violate intellectual property policies (even if your school has not yet mandated one). Well worth it in this case. You, me, and anyone else are free to use these images as we like, as long as we give the artists credit, pass the resulting work along under the same terms, and don’t charge for them.

You never know what people will be interested in. When presenting this site to the ELP meeting last week, the last thing I thought anyone would be interested in was the little webpage I had stuck in the footer of all of my pdfs.

Well, I tried my hand at a few for the ELP, and here they are:

And, finally my quicky attempt to match the Obirin logo colors

Just copy and pste anywhere you like. They are .png files, but use them just the way you would use .jpg files. If you don’t care for my rather uninspired color selections, actually that is one reason this site is so monochrome, make your own at Adam Kalsey’s World Famous Button Maker.

A follow up to the handout on suffixes in Alibrandi (thanks for the comment, Ted). Same format, but this one’s on prefixes. It may seem out of sequence to present suffixes THEN prefixes (after all, prefixes come at the beginning of a word), but I would point out that words with suffixes are easy to classify according to part of speech (e.g., words w/ -tion are nouns, words w/ -ly are adverbs, etc.), while words with the same prefix can be different parts of speech (e.g., international, internationally). I don’t know if this makes them harder to learn, but you can’t really organize them to the same extent…

Word parts II (ali)

This is a vocab worksheet for Looking for Alibrandi focusing on suffixes. It has examples of noun, adjective and adverb suffixes and a fill-in exercise using quotes from Chapter five. Ss scan the text to see if their answers are correct…

Word Parts I (Ali)

Each of these crossword puzzles are drawn from the list of vocabulary words in Simon Cookson’s cloze exercises. These might be good for students who need a little more spelling practice and recycling of vocabulary. If the Odakyu Line continues to be unstable, you could keep a few handy to fill some spare minutes until the whole class arrives.

Download a Holes Vocabulary Crossword for Chapters 1-10

And, get a puzzle for Chapters 11-22

Answer sheet? You’ll have to make your own. This puzzle was with Puzzlemaker’s Criss-Cross Tool.

A pair of handouts to familiarize Ss with a range of words and phrases used to connect ideas in writing. If your Ss are ready for something more than ‘first’, ‘next’, and ‘finally’, you may want to have a look. The handouts have clozes (based on the online quizzes for chapters 3 and 5) asking Ss to distinguish between six types of connectors followed by additional examples of each type.

It may also be necessary to teach appropriate sentence patterns. There is plenty of room to improve on these, so here they are in Word format.

Connectors 1 (alibrandi)

Connectors 2 (alibrandi)

Here is the Talking Book for all of Alibrandi.

http://elpweb.com/ali/itunes.html

enjoy!