Sunday 28 June 2009

Mucky Pup in "Draining" Loo Incident


Teaching colloquial English in the correct context is of great importance for language learners. Numerous "slang" lessons have evolved from what I have heard in person on the street or snippets gathered from the telly or the Internet. I am always looking out for examples to use and demonstrate in the classroom. In fact, there is a future lesson idea in all sorts of everyday situations that I encounter. I have just read an article from Yahoo news entitled "Mucky Pup Saved In Dramatic Toilet Rescue" and couldn't resist doing the quick newspaper clipping generator activity above from www.fodey.com.

Vocabulary
a pooch: a dog
the loo: commonly known as the toilet/lavatory in UK English
a toddler: a young child that has started walking (poetic licence used in my article)
a pup: a baby dog
mucky: dirty
a "plumb" job: a play on the word plumber/plumbing. A plum job = a fantastic job
draining: a play on the word "drain" and an adjective meaning exhausting
flush the toilet: pull the chain so that water will engulf the contents down the drain

Lesson Exploitation
Ask your students if they have ever had a "sticky" situation occur with a pet of theirs or heard of an unusual story in the news about someone else's pet. Have the students compare their stories and then get them to vote on the most unusual one mentioned in the class. Students quickly read the above newspaper snippet and analyse any new words in context. Ask them to predict the full story before reading the article. Once the article has been read and new vocabulary has been reviewed, students can do a short summary writing activity.

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