Last but one lesson on "The Fun They Had"

18.12.2009

Today, we first warmed up with an audio document about 4 x 4s. You had to find out about the advantages and the drawbacks. Here is what you said and wrote:

Warm up: 4x4s (four by fours)

Advantages: they are performant, they can drive nearly everywhere...
Drawbacks: they are pollutant..., they guzzle fuel.

guzzle: consume / waste a lot of energy (petrol), they destroy the ozone layer.

You can listen to the document here again:

Then we continued on speaking about the short story "The Fun They Had" and more precisely about the characters. Here is what we said about them:

Margie Jones: she is eleven and she is a pupil. She hates school. She is fed up with studying. She gets on our nerves. she is capricious, stubborn and unbearable.

Tommy: he is 13 and he his a pupil too. He is curious because he is interested in old books. He is always looking for things and reading. He is a bookworm.

The inspector: he looks nice and gentle. He is patronizing with Margie. He gives her an apple, smiles at her and pats her head. His role is to repair and slow down the mechanical teacher.

Finally we listened to the whole short story again.

HW: you will have to be able to read the short story with the correct accent and I particularly want you to spot out the sentences where there is "contrastive accentuation" (like in the sentence "Centuries ago" where "Centuries" is in italics).

Advertising