Have you heard yet? We've added three fabulous games to MEC as a Christmas treat!

Make compound nouns and phrasal verbs in Dominoes, play with plurals in Leap of Faith

Come along to our December MEC online clinic and we'll show you our favourite new videos. There are 25 new general English videos and new exercises to go with them.

We will be holding the clinic on the following dates:

21st December 11am UK time

22nd December 3pm UK time

If you would like to attend and you are a MEC customer just send me an email at s.milligan@macmillan.co.uk with your name and the school or university you work for.

What are MEC clinics?
MEC clinics are short sessions (this one will be an hour) involving groups of no more than 25. They are on a first-come, first-served basis to any MEC teachers or administrators.

There is no cost involved:
we will set up and host the sessions. Those attending simply need a computer with internet access, sound and ideally a microphone. 

One school, 71 languages

This week's news item is our monthly news item for teens. It is about a school in London which has students from all over the world who speak many different languages.

You can find this story in the News Items section on your Work Area screen.

You can also find longer versions of the news item with extension activities by logging in to our teachers' area here.

Here's an idea:

1. Ask your students to bring in a photo of themselves on a usb, disc or saved somewhere on the internet

2. Get your students to go to Photofunia and choose one of the many backgrounds and effects to add their photo to. I think your teens will be particularly excited about the Twilight example below.

3. Take your group back to the classroom and give them ten minutes to think about why they chosethe effect they did.

4. Get students to show their photo on an interactive whiteboard or a data projector and present their photo and explain the reasons for choosing it to the class. The class could vote on their favourite one.

I found out about this photo site by reading Life Feast an EFl blog which has some lovely examples of what you can do with Photofunia. I thought I’d better join the club so here’s one I made earlier…

World cup pitches to go greener

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about an order by FIFA, the world governing body of football, that European grass must be used for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

You can find this story in the News Items section on your Work Area screen.

December word games

This month's Witch's Pot topics are 'adjectives to describe a restaurant'(Easy), 'words that follow ''self-''' (Average) and 'past participles to follow ''I had my hair''' (Difficult).  

The Swamp Disaster topics are 'the natural world' (Easy), 'health'(Average) and 'words which mean ''exclude''' (Difficult).

The Wordsearch topics are 'space travel'(Easy), 'parts of newspaper' (Average) and 'adjectives describing animals'(Difficult).

There are new Crosswords and Bridge Builders at all levels too.

Visit the Word Games area to find them all.

Have a look at this website. It's called Verbix and you can conjugate verbs in over a hundred languages including English. You just write in the stem of the verb and click Go.

It might be a nice MEC Web Link to send to your students. They could have it open when they are completing writing exercises as homework or when they are doing MEC resources in the computer lab.

UN representative meets homeless victims of American property dream

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about a United Nations representative who is investigating the growing problem of homelessness in the USA.

You can find this story in the News Items section on your Work Area screen.