Synonyms for good and bad ! :)

Here you will find the list we've been talking about since last year.

Have a look and start using more and more vocabulary!

Should cellphones be allowed in Highschool?

My dear students, here you will find the instructions to work in class with María Laura after Holidays.

1. The group will be divided as follows:

TEAM 1: (PROPOSITION) Loana – Leila – Tomás Teliz – Franco – Benjamín

TEAM 2: (OPPOSITION) Angelo – Lucía – Valen Infantino – Mechi – Mariano – Facu T.

TEAM 3: (PROPOSITION) Juanfri – Marina – Andy – Zoe – Gastón – Valen P.

TEAM 4: (OPPOSITION) Natalia – Thomas – Valen L – Facu – Clara – Lautaro

   2. Each group is going to prepare a presentation about the topic we had been working with before holidays (should cellphones be allowed in Highschool?). 

   3. Each group will build ONE presentation defending their position. It should last 10 minutes (each student will talk for 2’ aprox). You must include visuals, but the most important thing is that the content should be complete and strong, and that your attitude must be absolutely persuasive. You will start and finish them during the class, to be presented the following Wednesday. 

Good Luck :) 

Building persuasive arguments

Instructions:

1. Read about the ARE method. Once you have finished, work on the photocopy and complete the missing information.
2. Now, watch this short extract from High School Musical, in which a school professor takes all the students’ cellphones away and sends them to detention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTZKFuFbRq0 

     3. Discuss about the positive and negative things of having a cellphone at school.

     4. Finally, write one full argument following the ARE method either in favour or against          the topic.

Some ideas for your speeches!

Why do girls brains' mature faster than boys' brains?

It’s always been conventional wisdom that girls reach maturity more quickly than boys, but now scientists have provided some proof.

In new research published in the journal Cerebral Cortex,an international group of researchers led by a team from Newcastle University in England found that girls’ brains march through the reorganization and pruning typical of normal brain development earlier than boys’ brains. In the study, in which 121 people between ages 4 to 40 were scanned using MRIs, the scientists documented the ebb and flow of new neural connections, and found that some brain fibers that bridged far-flung regions of the brain tended to remain stable, while shorter connections, many of which were redundant, were edited away. And the entire reorganization seemed to occur sooner in girls’ brains than in boys’ brains.

Females also tended to have more connections across the two hemispheres of the brain. The researchers believe that the earlier reorganization in girls makes the brain work more efficiently, and therefore reach a more mature state for processing the environment. What drives the gender-based difference in timing isn’t clear from the current study, but the results suggest that may be a question worth investigating.

Girls' brains can begin maturing from the age of 10 while some men have to wait until 20 before the same organisational structures take place, Newcastle University scientists have found.

Gender differences

Dear students,
Here you have a video that could help you finding differences and similarities between boys and girls, both natural and cultural.
Try to see if you can find some ideas to build strong arguments for our next DEBATE!!!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld3UHKmwVZc 

INSTRUCTIONS FOR WEDNESDAY'S CLASS

My dear students,
Remember what we have been working with last class? OK, here's how we are going to continue.

• During your first class period, you are going to read a photocopy which contains information on how to structure a debate (beginning-middle-ending). After reading it, you are going to make a summary about it. It is individual, and you will get a mark for it.
• After break, you are going to make groups of three, and you are going to prepare a SPEECH. It must be about HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT... cellphones/electricity/Internet, etc (choose one alternative).
• You are not supposed to say if you can live without them or not (as we did last class). You must provide some ideas/suggestions about how to live without them. Your speeches must last 3 minutes, and they have to be ENTERTAINING. You are free to choose how to make it: you can use visuals, represent it (act some parts), or just speak in front of your class. It has to be absolutely ORIGINAL, CREATIVE and should HOOK your audience. Please, send me an email before the class finishes saying what your presentations will be about.
• Presentations will be held on Wednesday 23rd. Get ready and good luck!!!!!!!!

PS: Don't miss me!!!!!!!!!! ;) 

Identifying purposes: Video Analysis II

And this is Video #3!!!

Identifying purposes: Video Analysis

Here you have the videos we worked with last class. If you want, you can watch them again in order to make a wonderful TP for Wednesday!
Any doubt, please, let me know!!!!! :)

Video #1
  

Video #2

Video for the final TP

Kids, have a look at this interesting video about the negative impact of zoos in animals.

• Take notes of at least 3 arguments provided by the speaker.
• Choose one of them and make a complete refutation (based on evidence and reasoning, using the "Four Step Refutation Method").

Ready for the challenge?
Good luck! :)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiAvQqsfchY

Analysing candidacies

Dear students,
While we listen to our partners' speeches, we will fill in this form...
Later, we will see who was the most successful and persuasive speaker!

Ready to go?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17l-u00lkeiw4fwqZeKW7te641Yl9zBZvLTxHZ23rKB0/viewform

"I have a dream"

Martin Luther King

He was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor.  
 In 1955, in Boston, he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream"; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Timemagazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. 

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.


Let's watch his most famous speech: "I have a dream"!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J9fdQLNiAY

Some useful links for your speeches!

Have a look at these sites in order to prepare your speeches! Any doubt, please let me know! :)

On this site, you will find pros and cons on the motion: "School attendance should be voluntary".
http://www.debate.org/opinions/should-school-attendance-be-voluntary




Some Pros and Cons of Smoking
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Pros_and_cons_of_making_smoking_illegal



Some information about Cellphones at school.
http://life.familyeducation.com/cellular-telephones/school/51264.html
http://teaching.about.com/od/admin/f/Embrace-Cell-Phones-Or-Ban-Them.htm

Debate TP

Watch this video about Thomas Suarez, a 12 year-old- boy who has created several Iphone Apps.
When you finish watching it, solve your TP.
Good luck :)

Identifying communicational purposes

Kids, remember to have a look at these videos again, in order to answer the following questions:

• What is the communicational purpose in each video? (to entertain/to persuade/to inform)
• Who is the target audience?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36MEsWC1Pzc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjoygkr2zRA 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdcVRueT2cw

Any doubt, we will discuss it on Friday.

See you,

Tati.