1st week

So. The first teaching week is moving slowly to its end and, I should say I was very happy to be back to regular teaching after a very long period of summer holidays. The students finally almost got together in their old or new groups and, as it happens every year, I started with my routine: “So what are your most vivid memories from the summer?” To my surprise, nobody remembered Moscow heating wave and it was great as I really didn’t want to launch into that thing of the nature bad trick straight from the very beginning – so many scarring days we all had last summer! Then we watched a very funny video and wrote the stories based on it. What I particularly like about short movies is that we normally get down to the task very quickly. Anyway, that vocabulary-rich topic of climate change finally emerged and both of my groups came up with the following list of chunks, taken from the brainstorming stage, newspaper articles, headlines and discussions:
Heat & haze make life hell
heavy blanket
some respite
smog looks set to get worse
wildfires blanketed the capital with toxic smoke
The unprecedented heat wave
Moscow was shrouded in smoke
wildfires raging
Moscow chokes from forest fires in melting heat
Russia’s emergencies teams are bracing themselves for worse to come
forest and peat fires continue to hold their grip
keeping the landscape tinder-dry
scorching temperatures
Moscow Heat Wave Burning The City
smog reaches 10 times the safe levels
Russia’s sweltering
blazes keep springing up
Moscow is being engulfed by suffocating smog
a few days’ reprieve
firefighters struggle to cope with the blazes
Firefighters make headway
Moscow gets relief
a long-awaited cooling trend
hard overnight rains in some locations and
clear morning skies free of smoke-induced smog
Air temperatures hovered in the mid-30s Celsius
They have severely taxed the giant nation’s firefighting capacity

Hopefully, next week we’re installing new tech equipment, which will let us capture all the language in the board for further revising and recycling. Lucky we are!

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