Blogs from Earls Court, Greater London, England, United Kingdom, Europe - page 3

One week to go so I guess everyone is getting pretty excited. Last week of exams, lots of marking for the teachers, a weekend spent packing and organising last-minute things and then off to the airport on Monday.... read more

Gday all Well here we are in London at our second hotel. We didn't have a great start with our accomodation. The first hotel we stayed at was The Blue Bells hotel in Kensington Gardens but it was a 3 storey listed (protected) building so it had no lift and we got stuck on the 3rd floor so after a 14 hour sleep we switched to a chain hotel called the ibis Hotel London Earls Court. A good travel tip here don't try to save 20 pounds, instead, go for the hotel with a lift and porters...lol Checkin was not until midday so we went for a walk around Eals Court/Fulham area with the idea of getting the extra clothes that we needed so after a 2 hour walk we ended up with a cheap mobile ... read more

CHAOS!!!!!........So much for Jeff's trip-organizing skills.....Next trip we are taking a nice safe bus tour, because at least the guide on the bus tour would not try to load us (cram us is probably a better word) onto a train on the Piccadilly line of the London Underground (which is, by the way, the busiest subway line in the world) at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday night! Admittedly, he was some help getting us out of the airport, but come on....there are 13 million people in this city and all of them were trying to get onto the Piccadilly Line last night at 6:00. Malcolm: I am pretty sure after taking escalator after escalator deeper and deeper that the Piccadilly Line is actually about half way to China. Karen: Today we took double decker bus tour ... read more

The 3rd Celta weekend(14th-15th August) was dedicated to writing assignment number 3- Skills Related Tasks where we had to prepare a listening lesson , with a rationale and 6 follow-on activities. Tue the 17th was a loong day! In the morning we had 1h30min to write our 4th Assignment - Lessons from the Classroom where we had to draw together and articulate what we had learnt about teaching techniques and principles from our own classroom teaching ,observing our peers' classroom teaching and observing experiences teachers at work. We were asked to refer to our own teaching strengths and weaknesses and choose 4 topics to focus on. I chose Concept Checking, TTT, instructions/ setting up activities and use of whiteboard/OHP. In the afternoon I delivered a lesson on skills: a 60min class on Writing a website profile ... read more

It's been an awfully long and hard week. If I had to recap, it would sound something like this: very little sleep, very much drama. My TP (Teaching Practice) 4 on Tuesday the 3rd on Grammar Practice - Present Perfect + Past Simple was hectic! My tutor actually put the word 'wired' in my TP feedback. Tried to do a zillion activities in 30 minutes. Students enjoyed my 'Pass the orange' game and all other activities, so I was pretty happy with myself. The only problem I had going through all the stages of a grammar lesson was the fact that we did not get any TP notes, which meant that we were basically thrown to the wolves! So as I know my grammar well and love it to bits, I wanted to make a point ... read more