Article: Personalize the learning experience by drawing from familiar examples in your life, then ask the students to draw from their own lives in turn. This helps the students connect the verb tenses you're introducing to the ways they already think about and use language in their everyday lives. For instance: "I drove to work this morning. In fact, I drive to work every school morning. Can you name some things you did this morning, and things you do every morning?" Along the way, point out how they're using different verb tenses, often without even realizing it. In this case, authenticity means relevant and personalized, rather than abstract and disconnected. Have your students write up a recap of what they did yesterday, or create a schedule for what they'll do tomorrow. Ask them to give directions to their home, favorite restaurant, etc. Let's face itverb tenses can seem like pretty dull subject matter. Anything you can do to connect them to the lives and experiences of your students will help. Gathering your class together as a group to play a familiar game can make learning verb tenses easier and more fun. Also, certain games are particularly useful in teaching certain aspects of verb tenses. For example: Charades helps with the present perfect tense: "He is walking a dog!" or "They are playing tennis!" "Mother May I" is useful for helping verbs like may, could, and should: "Mother may I," "Yes, you may" (substitute "can" and "should" as desired). Create a storyboard by drawing or cutting out several pictures that, when combined, tell a simple story. Jumble up the pictures and attach them to the board. Have you students put the story back in the proper order, but require them to tell you what happened both before and after each picture they want to move. The game becomes even more of a learning experience (and fun!) if the pictures can be arranged in different ways to tell different stories. Get creative in making up your storyboard! Make up a narrative story that is described in 16 sentences. Type each sentence onto a card and cut it out. On the other side of the card, use the same sentence, but don't provide the correct verb tense. Your students can first arrange the story cards in the proper order, then play using the tense-free side of the cards and provide the proper verb tenses. For instance, one side of the card might say: "It was snowing outside when Karen looked out of the window in the morning." The other side might say: "It [snow] outside when Karen [look] out of the window in the morning." You can find templates for this type of game onlinefor instance, at https://mikeastbury.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/narrative-tenses-cards.pdf
Question: What is a summary of what this article is about?
Go back and forth with your students, providing interesting examples. Provide authentic opportunities to practice verb tenses. Play group games to help identify specific verb tenses. Use storyboards to help practice past tenses. Make narrative story cards for your students to complete and arrange.
Article: A genre is a specific category of music, such as bluegrass, rock 'n' roll, rap, etc. Often times people have wide musical tastes, and find it hard to pinpoint exactly what genre they love the most. However, there are some easy ways to at least narrow the list down to a few select genres. The easiest thing to do is to scroll through your iTunes library, or other music download library, and look where it says "genre" next to each song. Count how many times each appears to see what genre is most prevalent in your music library. Nowadays, genre has grown to include dates in which music came out. For example, 70's rock 'n' roll, or 50's pop. Your music library should also contain the date in which a song is released. See whether the majority of your songs are contained within a specific decade, year, or era. Write down 2-3 genres you wish to search for. Specific internet sites and/or radios organize random lists of music organized into all types of categories, including genre. Listen to some of your favorite songs. Pay special attention to the instruments used. A song might have a strong bass line (bass guitar), a guitar solo (electric/acoustic guitar), or maybe even a trumpet playing in the background. Whatever it may be, write down some of the instruments you particularly like. You might even want to go through your entire music download library to see what instruments occur the most. After you have your list complete, you can then type in specific instrument names such as "trombone," "piano," etc. into a music site search engine. This will pull up all the possible songs which use that instrument(s) in the song. You can even focus your search results more by grouping instruments you like together. For example, you can type in "piano, bass guitar, tuba" into the search engine. This will bring up songs with those three instruments only. You can scroll through your music library and see how many times an artist appears. Write down two or three names and search for them online. If you have all of that artist's major hits, you add words like "rare" or "unreleased" to your search engine of choice to find songs by them you might not have previously heard. The great thing about focusing your search on a particular artist is that it opens you up to the possibility of finding other artists like them. Take for example that you are obsessed with the group Led Zeppelin. Type into your search engine "artists like Led Zeppelin" to find similar types of music. These are often topics such as love, commitment, relationships, having fun, depression, sadness, loneliness, happiness, etc. You might wish to listen to love songs like you always do, or you might be having a down day, and wish to listen to a sad song. It is important to pay attention to the tone of certain songs as well. Searching for a song which "sounds happy" is different from a song which is lyrically happy. You might be looking for music to listen too. For that, you need to focus your searches on music sharing sites, such as Youtube, Spotify, Pandora, etc. If you are instead, looking for sheet music to play, you will need to search other websites and sources. For sheet music, try http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/advanced-search or http://en.scorser.com/D/Sheet+music.html. You can search through sheet music based on lyrics, instruments used, and even notes.
Question: What is a summary of what this article is about?
Figure out what genre you like. Search for music with certain instruments. Decide what artists you like. Choose subject matter to search for. Differentiate between songs and sheet music.