Weddings in Malta

Weddings in Malta are almost always big, lavish affairs that involve a long church ceremony, fancy cars and huge receptions for anything from 250 to 600 guests on average. It is typical to invite all the family on both sides, including distant cousins, as well as the couple's colleagues, bosses, neighbours and even old school friends.

In contrast, Bulgarian weddings, while slowly becoming Westernized in clothes and traditions, are usually a little smaller, around 50-200 guests, and will involve close family and friends, and the occasional neighbour.

Below is an example of a modern Bulgarian wedding, mixing traditional costume with a Western-style wedding gown, as well as an image of a traditionally dressed couple.

     

LearningApps on literature

Guess the character's name before you run out of petals!
This could be used as an introduction to a literature lesson or to a reading lesson on the topic of famous literary characters.
It can be continued with an exercise on imagining a day in the life of specific characters.

Collecting resources in one place

There are two main tools for creating little, easy-to-access databases of resources that you can share with students or other teachers. One is Blendspace, which you can see in action here.

The other, whose design and editing menus I like more, is Pearltrees, which I've embedded below. Pearltrees works in the same way, and has better design-related capabilities. However, it cannot be embedded by HTML into other pages and blogs.

Presentations, by robertabas

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! (Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious)

I thought I'd start with one of my most popular go-to lessons when there is no programme to follow or I have to come up with a lesson on the spot. It works for all ages and levels and can be easily linked to other activities.

Objectives:
- Recycle vocabulary that students know in a new context.
- Practise story-telling tenses, vocabulary and structures.

I start the lesson by writing the word PLANET on the board. I get students to make new words out of the letters as an open-class activity, and clarify the rules as they go:

1. Do not repeat letters unless they are repeated in the word.
2. Do not use letters that are not in the word on the board.

Once students have come up with ten or so words, I put a new word down on the board:

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS

I give students twenty minutes to work in pairs, making words from these letters.

During the twenty minutes I go around, moderating the word creation and helping along students who are stuck. Once the twenty minutes are up, I tell students to start writing a story in pairs, using as many of the words they have come up with. They underline the words as they use them and shouldn't repeat them.

Five minutes in, or once they have written an appropriately-sized paragraph for their level, students pass their story to the person on the left who continues it.

Two minutes later, they repeat this.

I repeat this a couple of times until the time they have is down to 30 seconds and they only have time to read the last sentence and write a short sentence of their own.

Once they are done, students get their original story back, they peer-review it, fixing mistakes they can spot. Then they read the stories aloud, and vote for the best one as a class.