Names
http://www.mandarintools.com/chinesename.html
The first few pages of unit 1 look at names and what they mean. Here is the opportunity to extend this topic and find out more about your students.
Start off by asking your students if they know what their names mean and why they were given their names. A lot of students might not know the meaning of their name (lots of western names have little meaning other than historical links). However, students from Asian or Middle Eastern countries often have names with significant meanings.
This fantastic site gives your students the opportunity to get a Chinese name, including the characters to write it! Great fun and very motivating.
Memory
http://www.factmonster.com/spot/memory1.html
How good is your memory? Page 6 has a brief focus on ways of improving your memory. This site is a good way of testing just how good your students’ memories are. Tell your students that they will have one minute to look at a picture and they should memorise as much as they can. Click on the site and after one minute get them to click on the ‘Test’ button at the bottom. Your students will now be faced with a number of multiple choice questions. If you pair up the students for this activity they can discuss what they think the correct answers are.
Describing people
http://www.talkeasy.co.uk/link/materials/esl11.html
Page 7 takes a very brief look at ways of describing people. Use this site to extend your students’ vocabulary. Your students could divide the adjectives into positive and negative groups.
Unit 2
Places
Dream holidays, places and cities around the world are the three areas that unit 2 looks at. Here are a number of sites that look at most, if not all, of these areas.
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/
http://travel.roughguides.com/destinationshome.html
Use one of these two sites to get more information on one of the cities mentioned in the unit.
You could divide the class into groups and ask each group to look at a different city. Then, after 20–30 minutes, regroup the students and get them to exchange the information they have found.
http://www.cities.com/
Here is another site which brings you information about over 4,300 cities in 150 countries. Ask your students to pick three cities and then to make a comparative study of them. They can then post their results on a noticeboard, write a short quiz of their own and create a display of the information they have discovered.
Wonders of the world
http://library.thinkquest.org/J002388/?tqskip1=1&tqtime=0708
Here is a chance to extend the topic of places. On page 10 there are pictures of four different cities. Two of these pictures, Venice and Rio, show buildings or monuments that could be regarded as ‘wonders’ of the world. Why not see if your students can name the seven wonders of the world? Then get them to take a look at this site, which also includes a section on the seven natural wonders of the world. The material here is ideal for a jigsaw reading activity or for project work.
Unit 3
Celebrity relationships
http://www.hellomagazine.com/
Unit 3 delves into the world of showbiz relationships with a ‘What went wrong?’ feature on page 16. The problem with this kind of topic in a coursebook is that it dates quickly and isn’t always up-to-the-minute. So, here is the perfect solution. Have a look at the online version of Hello magazine to get the latest gossip about the stars. Set your students a few general questions such as Who is dating who?, Who is splitting up?; Who is getting married soon? etc.
http://www.peoplenews.com/
Another site that contains all the latest gossip to keep your lessons up-to-date and also works well as the articles are short. Apart from the headlines on the front page click on Love Bites to get all the latest celebrity dating gossip. If you check this out the night before your lesson you could write a few comprehension questions similar to the ones on page 16 of the book.
Famous couples
http://hicards.com/valentine/vcouples.html
To extend the topic of famous couples you could play the well-known pairing game. Write the names of famous couples on labels and then stick a label on each student’s back. Look at this site for some inspiration for couples. Students guess the name on their back by asking yes/no questions to other students. They then have to find their partner.
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/lovestories1.html
Here are ten short stories about great true loves. This is ideal material for jigsaw reading or true/false questions.
Unit 4
Sports personalities
http://www.sporting-heroes.net/
If you find the BBC site too British then try this fantastic site with thousands of photos and brief profiles of sporting personalities. There are six sports featured: football, rugby, cricket, golf, tennis and athletics. All are searchable by name, particular sport and decade, making it easy to find who you want.
You could print out the pictures and play a ‘who is this?’ game, create a chart like the one on page 22, or set an online quiz with questions such as When was Emil Zatopek born?; What was Pele’s real name? etc.
Tiger Woods
http://www.geocities.com/mairj2344/tigercount.html
http://world.std.com/~rgu/tigerwoods/tigerwoods.faq
Page 26 has a short article about Tiger Woods. Here are a couple of sites with lots of information about Tiger. The first is quite professional in appearance while the second is very basic but full of interesting information.
