Super Bowl weekend is over!

The one weekend a year when American football gets spammed all over sports pages around the world is over. My favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, lost a close game to the Green Bay Packers, making the Packers the Super Bowl Champions for this year. NRK showed the game live, but it was in the middle of the night Norwegian time. Did you watch any of it? I know people who stayed up to watch the whole thing!

American football is different from what most of the world calls football (also known as association football, or soccer). It's more like rugby, another game that isn't too well-known in Scandinavia. I've been looking for an explanation of American football on the Internet, and believe it or not, the best one I have found has been from the BBC: A Guide to the Basics of American Football and a Guide to the Positions of American Football. The coach who presents both these guides speaks rather fast, so you may need to listen to it a few times before you understand him.

I will comfort myself by remembering that the Steelers have won six Super Bowls, and that is more than any other team!

Open Thread for Week 5

Here's a place to talk about anything that happened this week!

Need some help with your Northern Ireland / Terror on the Tube presentations?

The BBC's excellent Newsround service for younger readers and foreign-language English learners has useful information about The Troubles in Northern Ireland and about the July 7th, 2005, terror attacks on the London Underground. Here are the links:

Northern Ireland and The Troubles

The July 7th Attacks

Other links (check back, I will be updating these!):

The Omagh Massacre, the last major incident of The Troubles, carried out by the so-called "Real IRA" just weeks after the Good Friday Agreement was signed

A timeline of the 2005 London Tube bombings  from Wikipedia

And a few more...

Symbols used in murals in Northern Ireland, by both Loyalist (Protestant) and Republican (Catholic) groups

Photos of murals in Northern Ireland

And more...
A BBC presentation on the Tube Bombings,  including facts about the bombings and about the police investigation that followed.

The blog our "Terror on the Tube" sound file comes from.  This is the story of "Rachel", who we met through the sound file on the Tracks website. Here she adds more detail, and uses some words that aren't appropriate in a school textbook!

The Guardian's page on the attacks.  The Guardian is a large British newspaper. Here they have collected hundreds of articles about the attacks and the aftermath.

Wisconsin Dells and other resorts

This week the second-year students worked on an exercise about a lifeguard at a waterpark in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, USA. The Wisconsin Dells is a natural feature on the Wisconsin River, a canyon at the river narrows with beautiful rocks formations carved by millions of years of running water. Wisconsin Dells, WI, is a town near the Dells. Wisconsin Dells is a family resort town, full of people during the summer tourist season, and especially known for its water parks. I visited the Dells as a little girl in - eep - 1976. That was before water parks were invented!

Does spending your summer vacation visiting water parks sound like your idea of heaven? Or maybe you prefer seeing a new city, or travelling where most tourists fear to tread?

A Shooting in Arizona

On Saturday, eighteen people were shot outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. Six were killed. One of the dead was a nine-year-old girl named Christina Green. The main target was Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who represents the southern part of Arizona in Congress. (You may also see her called Representative Giffords. Both are correct.) She had come to the supermarket to talk to voters.

There are many stories in the media about this tragedy. There are also many rumors! This article from the BBC lists what we know about what happened. If you find that difficult to read, there is a simpler version on Newsround, the BBC's news service for younger readers.

Please feel free to write your thoughts about this shooting in the comments.

Open Thread for Week One

Here's an open thread for the first week back to school! Here you can say anything you want about what happened in English class this week.

Wakko's 50 State Capitols

First-years, you made some great posters in class on Thursday! Would you like to learn more about what you would find in the fifty US states? This link takes you a map of the US, with clickable links to the tourist office for each state. Even North Dakota wants tourists to come visit!
Each state has a capital, of course. Children in US schools are often told to learn the names of all the states and their capitals. This is a song about them from a cartoon called the Animaniacs. (Wakko is right: Maryland clam chowder is wonderful! Though I miss their crabcakes more.)