Inside Out Web Guides
Unit 9
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/crime/0,2759,339240,00.html
Try this or other newspaper sites by typing the name of the newspaper eg. Guardian, in the Search Box in order to find out the latest about Crime in the UK. Brainstorm what types of crime you think are most common in the UK then use the information on these sites the check the predictions. Another activity is to look at the way in which a crime is reported and then ask the students to write their own newspaper report either using a recent crime which they know about or one of the murders from the previous site.
Unit 10
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/home.asp
Unit 10 talks about winning but "It’s not the winning..." just the coming first! That must surely be the motto of the Guinness Book of Records and the online site for this superlative book. Brainstorm a number of areas in which people may have a record and, if you want, try and guess the result, eg. How old was the oldest ever woman? Student A: I guess 123 years old. Student B: No, 145. Then get the students to check their guesses using the search facility on this site.
http://www.adventure-video.com/everest/index.html
This site details the exploration/climb which discovered the remains of Mallory, the first man to conquer Everest, who is mentioned in the article on page 92. Get your students to discuss what might be needed to climb such a mountain, and they can check their guesses on the sites. Then ask them to make a quiz using the information here, eg. Which is the easiest route up Everest? Plus, you could put them in groups and ask them to plan an expedition up Everest using the information they have found, before finally comparing the ideas.
Unit 11
http://www.snopes2.com/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/library/bltop20.htm
Choose four of the urban legends from either of these sites. Put your students into groups of four, A, B, C and D. Create a four way pyramid reading – A tells B their story and C tells D, then B tells C the story they heard and D tells A the story they heard, then C tells D the story and A tells B. In the next round B tells C their story and D tells A, then the procedure follows the same pattern. In the next step D recounts A's original story to A and vice versa while B recounts C’s story and vice versa. Finally they check up using the original stories.
The first site has some interesting categories and a colour coding system to indicate if the legends are true or not. Why not get your students to guess if they are true or not before they see the coding? The second site has a top 20 as well as lots of categories.
Unit 12
Page 117 introduces them to Mark Twain’s scheme to rationalise English spelling. Here are a few sites which deal with the issue of spelling in English in a humorous way.
http://jedihawk.com/jokes/poems/spellchecker.html
http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/english7.html
http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/english1.html
Unit 13
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/
Unit 13 takes a close look at charity and good causes. Why not get your students to take an up-to-date look at the latest issues on the official Oxfam site? Ask them to work in groups and give them a notional sum of money to give to good causes. Get them to decide which causes they would support and how much money they would donate. Alternatively, have a look at the official Save the Children site at http://www.savethechildren.org/home.shtml. You need to be careful as this can be quite an emotive subject.
