martes, 4 de febrero de 2014

Madrid Teacher series: Victoria's last weekend

This week's lesson in our Madrid Teacher series is devoted to Básico 2 and Intermediate 1 students. Victoria tells us about her last weekend.

The three-minute video clip is a good opportunity to revise the past simple in English.

First of all, watch the video through to get the general idea of Victoria's last weekend.
Now let's watch the video again but this time let's pay attention to the different verbs Victoria uses to refer to her routine at the weekend. We are just going to focus on the verbs in the past simple, both regular and irregular ones.
To make the activity a bit easier, we are going to divide Victoria's weekend in five different parts:
Friday evening
Saturday morning
Saturday after lunch
Saturday evening
Sunday

Watch the segment corresponding to each of the parts above and note down the verbs in the past simple Victoria uses. Yes this is a kind of dictation. Careful! Victoria is a fast talker. You may have to stop the video to be able to note down the verbs.

You can check your answers by reading the transcript below, where the the verbs in the past simple are highlighted.

What about you? What did you do at the weekend? Was it a typical weekend for you?



Hi, I’m Victoria Fontana from MadridTeacher.com and this is a video to help you learn English. Today we’re going to be talking about the past tense and studying a little bit about how to pronounce the past tense and I’m going to tell you about what I did last weekend to do this. Please pay careful attention to the pronunciation of the past tense and especially to the irregulars.
So, last weekend was a typical weekend for me. Friday evenings I have three classes, beginner, intermediate and advanced, and we had a fun class this past weekend, my students are fantastic so, no problem. And, after class a friend of me called me to go to have a drink near my house and I met with two friends, with Cristina and Guada. Cristina had gone to Berlin the weekend before so she came with some souvenirs for us and usually when I get together with my friends we talk about typical things, girl things and talk about boys basically. And Friday evening I came home pretty early because I was tired and on Saturday I had more classes.
So, Saturday morning I woke up. The first thing I always do when I wake up is eat breakfast and also feed my cats because they need to eat too and then I got ready, took my shower and prepared my class for… at ten o’clock I have class, and my first student came, we had a wonderful class, my second student came and after that was about lunch time so I decided to meet up with some other friends for lunch.
And after lunch on Saturday I had to run some errands, and, I did… I went to the Corte Inglés, I went to get some things for my cats, I have two new kittens and on Saturday afternoon I kind of just rested for a while.
Saturday evening I was invited to dinner at a friend of mine named Mark and Pepas, they had just had a new baby and they bought a new house so they decided they wanted us to come and see their new house. They live outside of Madrid so I had to take a train to Pozuelo and it was a nice evening, we had a normal, typical dinner, fantastic food because both of them are excellent cooks. I came home pretty early on Saturday because two nights out is pretty rough for someone my age.
On Sunday morning I woke up and very late, at around 12 o’clock which is my only day to sleep in. So, I woke up and had breakfast of course, typical and fed the cats and I decided that I would just relax on Sunday, and watch a movie, take it easy, make myself a nice lunch and basically that was pretty much my whole weekend and Sunday evening I just prepared for the next day and back to work on Monday. Thanks. Hope to see you again soon at Madridteacher.com