Saturday, 28 December 2013

Son, song and English...

My eldest son likes sports and music very much. His favorite sports are: football, volleyball, handball, tennis, swimming and cycling. I’m glad that he spends a great amount of his time practicing sports instead of using his computer all the time.
Apart from that he enjoys  listening  to the music and singing as well. One of his favorite songs is “The Fox”.

If he likes a specific song he looks up the lyric for this song on the Internet. I noticed that the memorizing the lyrics of a song is quite an easy task for him. Obviously, he doesn’t understand all the words but he often tries to explain their meaning. Sometimes, I ask him:
-        -   Don’t you spend so much time of listening to the music instead of learning  something for the school?
 But he answers me:
-         -  “Mum, I’m just learning English!”
What do you think about this way of learning a foreign language?
In my opinion, it’s a good idea to learn English or French trough songs!

By the way, his favorite song in French is Papaoutai”.

Friday, 27 December 2013

Christmas time!

I’m sure that you recognize this beautiful Christmas song of Cliff Richard
“…
It's a time for giving, a time for getting,
A time for forgiving and for forgetting.
Christmas is love, Christmas is peace,
A time for hating and fighting to cease.
…”
I love the magic time of Christmas when we are more kind and generous to one another.  We also try to forget all our problems, quarrels and just enjoy being together.  The preparation of the Christmas always reminds me my happy childhood, my mum, my dad, my brother and  my grandma. Unfortunately, my mum and my grandma aren’t already with us and  I miss them so much. Now, I have a big family and I’m really enjoying spending Christmas with my four wonderful boys: my husband and three sons. This year one of the best present was the Monopoly Olympic Games Edition.

Me and my children, we love playing games and we have a lot of fun of playing all together! It’s really joyful time for everybody!

Thursday, 28 November 2013

Amara and a beautiful film.

Hello, 
This week, I’m working with the Amara software which gives a great possibility to overcome accessibility and language barriers for online video. Thanks to this free and open source we can make the work of subtitling and translating video. It’s a useful and powerful tool for the foreign languages classes, for example. I don’t want to write only about Amara, but I would like to encourage you to see some beautiful film which my teacher of Amara showed us at the beginning of the online training course using the platform Moodle. I don’t know how I have to download this film from the Vimeo servis so I give you only a link (I couldn’t find it in YouTube) http://vimeo.com/29531643. This film tells a story about life, love, and … sugar packets.
A boy working at a coffee shop notices an old man repeatedly stealing sugar packets. The boy attempts to solve the mystery of this man’s strange behaviour. But the answer isn't at all what he expected… You must really see this film!



Starring: Ian Hyland, Bill McHugh and Tom Everett Scott
Director: Brian McAllister
Screenplay by: Rebecca Sue Haber
Producer: Robert Cammisa
Director of Photography: Dennis Donovan
Music: Jarkko HietanenExecutive
Producer: Jim Mayzik