Inside Out Web Guides
Upper-intermediate
Unit 1
http://www.time.com/time/time100/index.html
Time brings us a site with its 100 most famous people from the twentieth century. After you have covered the first two pages of this unit ask your students to discuss who they think the ‘person of the century’ is. Then, when they first enter this site they will be presented with a list – is their person on the list? If not, who do they think is the most important person on the list and why? As a follow up get them to read the articles, try out the quizzes and discover more than they could ever find in the average coursebook.
http://www.eonline.com/Fun/Quiz/Madonna/
‘Material girl’ quiz which links in directly with the feature article on page 9. Get your students to take the quiz and then discuss the results in the light of what they’ve read. Then get your students to choose a famous celebrity of their own (you could ask them to work in pairs so that they also need to speak) and using the information from this site http://mrshowbiz.go.com/ceebrities/ set them a task to write their own quiz for the other students.
Unit 2
http://www.cyberteens.com/ne/ad/index.html
This site might be very interesting but will depend on the age of your students – if they are teenagers then talk about problems with parents; if they are parents with teenagers, then discuss problems with teenagers. Otherwise ask them to try and remember when they were teenagers – what problems occurred? Click on this site and ask your students to read some of the letters. Discuss the problems and try and think of suitable solutions. You could turn this into a writing activity by getting your students to write letters of advice.
Unit 3
http://www.isu.edu/~trinmich/allabout.html
http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
The first two pages of unit 3 take a look at the Gold Rush in the USA during 1848 and 1849. Explore the topic further by using the three websites above. Apart from lots of information on the subject you can find out how the discovery of gold changed the population in California, scan a timeline or take a Gold Rush quiz.
Unit 4
http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/health/wellness/nutrition_moore.html
The body and your health is the focus of this unit. On page 38 there is an interesting article on ‘Food Fads’ and diets. This site starts with interesting facts about food and diets including recommendations on how much of different types of food to eat. Scroll down to find four common diets. A nice activity to do with this is to give the students the dietary information and the verdicts cut up. Subsequently ask the students to read the different pieces and match the right verdict to the diet it is commenting on.
