Peg Word System
How I can memorize B2-words from the theme: “Food”:
Sick (sickly) saviour (savoury) ate more fish (moreish) than were planned (bland).
How to memorize parts of the body:
Had Nick Sharped A Hard Fantastic Chestnut Stick to Knit Large Fox Tonight – Each word in this phrase corresponds to a part of the body—Head, Neck, Shoulders, Arm, Hand, Fingers, Chest, Stomach, Knees, Legs, Feet, Toes.
My Very Enormous Mom Just Sat Under Nine Planets – Each word in this phrase corresponds to a planet—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto
Bun (rhymes with one)
Shoe (rhymes with two)
Tree (rhymes with three)
Door (rhymes with four)
Knife (rhymes with five)
A – Apple
B – Banana
C – Carrot, etc/
Method of Loci
When you study vocabulary on the topic of products and shopping in a store, you can mentally associate each item with a specific place in the house. Then imagine that you are going to the store, and mentally walk through all the places in the house to remember all the words you have learned.
Say you want to remember the lyrics to a song consisting of new words. You can leave the lyrics lying around the room you have in your mind, too. Write some on the walls. Leave lyrics on notes stuck to the back of the door. Picture placing them all around the imaginary house so, when you sing this song, you can visualize walking around the house looking at the lyrics.
Let’s take a list of words to memorize:
Dog
Ball
Apple
Phone
Book
At this point we hypothesize the journey to our family, the one that takes us from the bedroom to the university:
Bathroom
Kitchen
Atrium of the palace
Bus stop
University
We associate, for example, the dog in the bathroom, the ball at the kitchen and so on. The more associations are strong and they create an emotion, the easier it is to memorize them.
Visual mnemonics
Meaning: decide to do the difficult task
Mnemonic: Imagine that someone tries to bite the bullet. You understood that biting the bullet seems already a difficult task (making an unrealistic vision)
Ask the student to take a photo in one of the rooms, and depending on the topic of the lesson, he needs to sign and then name each item in this location
When studying modal verbs, the teacher takes "screenshots" of some scenes from the series that the student watched at home and asks him what the hero is saying.
Rhymes
The most delicious sandwich,
For him I pay-paid-paid,
After the desk lay-laid-laid."
Come and go, but came and went;
tend and tended, bend and bent.
Try and tried, but buy and bought;
reach and reached, but teach and taught.
Busy, busy, busy bee
Bring some honey for my tea.
Here comes Mr. Crocodile,
Ready to swallow what’s in sight.
“May I ask you, big reptile,
Did you brush your teeth that night?”
Come with me to the Zoo, Zoo, Zoo
To see the kangaroo, roo, roo;
Watch him walk with a jump, jump, jump!
As he goes along with a bump, bump, bump!
Butterfly, butterfly,
Where do you fly?
So quick and so high
Musical mnemonics
This is the perfect, adaptable song for practicing saying where you’ve been and what you’ve done. Once the students are familiar with the rhyme, ask them to fill in the blanks with their own words:
Pussycat pussycat where have you been? I went to _____ to _____. Pussycat pussycat what did you do there? I ____
There are also different ways to talk about wishes, but a common way is very similar to the hope phrases in the last section.
We can have two people, and the first one makes the wish and the second one is the topic of the wish. The biggest difference is that wishes are unreal (or impossible), so you need to change the second verb to the past tense to indicate it’s unreal.
That may sound a bit confusing, but you can see many examples in the song “Stressed Out” by Twenty-One Pilots:
I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words
I wish I didn’t have to rhyme every time I sang
[I] wish we could turn back time to the good ol’ days
“If It Hadn’t Been For Love” by Adele
The third conditional is used to talk about actions in the past—but it’s unreal, meaning that we’re imagining different conditions and results that didn’t actually happen. This structure is pretty advanced, and it’s one of the trickiest things for my students to learn.
Adele’s song “If It Hadn’t Been For Love” (the original version by the Steeldrivers is also great) uses this structure to talk about a woman who killed her lover. She’s singing from jail, talking about how and why she killed him. Almost the whole song is in third conditional, but you can see examples in these verses:
[I] never woulda hitchhiked to Birmingham if it hadn’t been for love (“woulda” is an informal way to say “would have”)
[I] woulda been gone like a wayward wind if it hadn’t been for love
We use the past simple tense to describe things that started and finished in the past. In other words, these are completed actions. The past simple is one of the first things that intermediate students learn because it’s so common.
The main difficulty that many students have is remembering the past forms of the irregular verbs in English. If you’re not sure what those are, regular verbs end with an “-ed” in the past forms, but irregular verbs have many different forms in the past.
There are charts of most of the irregular verbs in English, but you just have to just practice them and memorize them over time. Fortunately, there are also some tricks to help you learn irregular verbs.
In this song, Bryan is remembering the past and what he and his friends did when he was younger. Some of the song is in the present but a lot of it takes place in the past.
“Can’t Stop the Feeling” is a feel-good song about how great dancing feels—and how great it feels to watch a person you like (or love) dance.
This song was used in the Disney movie “Trolls,” but if you listen to the lyrics closely you can also hear a more adult way to understand them. Can you hear both meanings?
Some slang terms include “in my zone,” meaning that you are completely focused on what you’re doing. The phrase “creeping up on you” means that something happens so slowly that you don’t notice it happening. The word phenomenally means really, really well or amazingly.
Sia’s catchy tune has a simple message: You don’t need money to enjoy yourself. Just keep dancing!
The lyrics repeat a few times, so this is a great song to practice understanding English lyrics.
Here are some terms to help you learn the song:
Cheap thrill — Something exciting (a thrill) that only lasts for a short time (because it’s cheap)
Won’t be long — A way to say that something will only take a moment
Hit the dance floor — Go onto the dance floor and start dancing
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