Today is a very special day for English, baby! After years of lessons about musicians and movie stars, we have our first lesson featuring an actual star! (Note: Our encounter with Jared Leto in Beijing came close but he didn’t contribute any vocab or grammar to the video.) Check out today’s music lesson, Party Vocab with Municipal Waste.

Now, Municipal Waste aren’t huge stars, but I’m a big fan and they are starting to break into the mainstream here and there (they got a review in Spin and I’m pretty sure they’ve been on MTV). Plus, the English lesson they could contribute was a no brainer. Who better to teach our members how to shotgun a beer?

So all in all, Municipal Waste turned out to be the perfect place to start my quest to get more and more artists to actually appear on the site. Bless them for being the first one! Now I will use their lesson as the example when I ask other artists to be in our videos. It may be a while until we’re doing slang lessons from the red carpet at award shows and breaking celebrity news with exclusive interviews, but today marks a small step in that direction.

If you feel like celebrating, watch the video and get wasted!

A while back, I wrote about using English, baby! or other social networking sites to teach students how to make inferences when they read. Today, I am going to talk about another reading lesson that you can do on social networking sites. I did it in my class this week and it was a bunch of fun. We practiced scanning for information and looking for headings on profiles.

I went ahead and found some good profiles. You want to find ones that are completely filled out and have some interesting information and nothing inappropriate. That is really the hardest part of the lesson. Well, prepping usually is. On our computer lab day, I had students get into pairs. I had already set-up the computers so that each pair had my profile on their screen and in another tab there was someone else’s profile. I had a student read my profile aloud. Then, we went through some of the vocabulary. I used a handout like this on social networking vocabulary and the scanning activity. Then, we practiced predicting where the information would be and scanning the profile for it. I had a list of questions for them to answer on the handout. Next, the pairs went off and scanned a different profile. When everyone was finished, we came back together and people shared interesting things about the person that they read about. It was so much fun.

The students were most interested by how many friends everyone had. I guess people do have a lot of friends on here! So maybe all of my teacher friends should give this a try and tell me how it goes.