Hi Everyone,
What’s the craziest thing in the English language??????? Yup, it’s HETERONYMS!! Yesterday we checked out a few heteronyms, starting with close – I close my notebook. I put my notebook close to the computer. Remember that the word close here is spelled the same in each sentence, BUT, has a different pronunciation, different meaning, and is a different part of speech. Here’s the slide show we used in class, take a look through it and practice saying the sentences out loud to hear the different pronunciations COMMON HETERONYMS
Yesterday’s topic was bullying. We discussed what is bullying, who is bullied, why are people bullied, where are people bullied, and how can we deal with bullying, from the perspective of the victim and the people who bully them. We discussed this definition of bullying from Wikipedia – bullying is the use of force, threat. or coercion to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively impose domination over others. The behavior is often repeated and habitual. Bullying can be defined in many different ways. Bullying consists of four basic types of abuse – emotional (sometimes called relational), verbal, physical, and cyber.
Then we talked about this poem ” Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” and argued that names and words do hurt many people. We looked at five different anti-bullying posters and described the message of each campaign, who was the target audience, was the poster effective and how did it make us feel. Great work everyone, on being so open and honest with your feelings and opinions! We all agreed that this is a difficult and complex topic.
We watched the video To This Day which is a spoken word poem by Shane Koyczan, who is a victim of bullying and began the To This Day project to raise awareness about the effects of childhood bullying
The video launched a discussion about causes of bullying, coping with bullying and our own personal experiences with bullying. It is indeed a complicated issue that we could spend hours talking about.
As usual, we finished up with the words of the day:
judgmental (adjective) : disapproving: tending to judge people too quickly and critically He thinks he is better than everyone else, he can be so judgmental.
muddy the waters (idiom) : to make something more complicated or difficult to understand The latest study on climate change muddies the waters by offering an alternative explanation for the causes of extreme weather conditions.
stench (noun) : a very bad smell: stink Rotting fruit left on the ground can sometimes have a bad stench.
Relax and practice!
ESL for one and all 