Human Planet is a British television documentary series produced by the BBC with co-production from Discovery and BBC Worldwide. It describes the human species and its relationship with the natural world by showing the remarkable ways human have adapted to life in every environment on Earth.
After watching the episode Arctic: Life in the Deep Freeze, now it's time to check your answers to the questions discussed in class, so click on the link below to find out!
Banksy is a pseudonymus England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humor with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. To see a slideshow of his best creations, click on the link below, and then watch the video to hear more about his last exhibit in the Bristol City Museum, and complete the quiz questions to test your understanding.
After watching the episode of Modern Family which deals with parenting issues, now it's time to review the words and expressions we worked on together in class. Below you can find the vocabulary sheet and the video, in case you wanna watch it again: A second viewing is surely gonna be of great help to understand all the things that are going on during this episode, and to catch all the jokes!
Wintertime is really at its peak right now! Just the perfect time for some cozy reading on the couch, huh? I suggest expanding our English vocabulary and our understanding of the human soul as we read a short story from one of the greatest contemporary Canadian writers: Alice Munro. The story "Chance" was published in 2004, in her book New Selected Stories. The idea is to have a brief literary workshop in class in a couple of weeks, when all of you have read the story and reflected on the discussion questions below. Also, and for your convenience, check out the glossary I made for you, before and while reading, as you like.
In case you feel like listening to more stories by Munro, here's a couple of audio files containing two stories from Munro's last collection, Too Much Happiness, really recommendable too!
The triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1504)
Hieronymus Bosch, born Jeroen Anthonissen van Aken (c. 1450 - August 9, 1516) was an Early Netherlandish painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of his works depicts sin and human moral failings. Bosch used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man. His works contain complex, highly original, imaginative, and dense use of symbolic figures and iconography, some of which was obscure even in his own time.
The video that follows is a short extract from a full documentary film produced by BBC FOUR, called Hieronymus Bosch and the Delights of Hell. While concentrating on the artist's central themes and imagery, the film also examines the medieval culture in which he worked. The extract below corresponds to part 1 (out of 5), and lasts 10 minutes. It has no English subtitles, except for the part they speak in French, but the narrator speaks fairly clearly and slowly. Now that we have analysed The Conjurer in class, maybe you feel like exploring more of his groundbreaking paintings. If so, the BBC FOUR documentary can be a good start!
This post is a follow up to the BBC documentary we watched last week, Seasonal Forests. The other day your classmate Oian brought to class a book he had on English for Agroforestry Specialties, and I think it is quite useful to learn some more new specific terms on nature and forests. So thanks, Oian! Here I ulpload a few pages of Lesson 1: Botany. There are some activities too, so I think you should all take a look at it.
After so much sweating last Friday, I figure you might as well like to try the fun part of this jungle of phonetic symbols... This game is called Guess the celebrity behind ! What follows is a classic matching exercise where you have a set of names and surnames of actors and actresses to match, but first you will have to take off their phonetic disguise!
And I'd like to thank my friend and fellow teacher Cristina Sánchez Soto for this activity!
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