A life story

On page 25 of your English Alive 4 book, we will work on practising different tenses to talk about our lives. In particular, you will work on:

1) The present simple (to talk about a sitution or action in the present)

2) The past simple (to talk about a finished action or event)

3) The present perfect (to talk about an action that happened in the past and has an effect on the present)

4) The present continous (to talk about things in progess now)

5) The past continuous (to talk about things in progress in the past)

6) will (to predict your future)

Here is my example. You will start to work on your life story in class and will finsih it at home with photos.


MY LIFE

I was born in a small town outside of Chicago called DeKalb. There is nothing special about it. There are a lot of corn fields. Fortunately, we didn't stay there long and we moved to another town about 25 miles outside of Chicago called Glen Ellyn. We lived there for 15 years. I went to grade school (Abraham Lincoln Elementary School), middle school (Hadley Junior High School) and high school (Glenbard West High school).


One of my clearest memories from grade school was when I was in the play Aladdin. I didn't have a very important role: I was Aladdin's mother. I had to sing a song and I had about 2 lines of dialogue. I loved my costume.


When I was in 6th grade I went to camp for the first time. I was really unhappy because my mom made me cut my hair. I took a stuffed lion with me to keep me company.

Later on, in high school, I was not only busy with school work but also helped out at my church. When I was 15, I went to Haiti to help build a well. (I don't have a photo of that). When I was 16, I went to Mexico to help paint an orphanage and play games with the children.

Then when I was 17, I went down to Mississippi, in the south of the USA. We travelled with another group of students who were from the center of Chicago. We went together as a mixed race group to a part of the USA where there still exists informal segregation. We helped families repair their homes and took care of their children while they were working. It was a good experience for me and it taught me a lot about the poverty and inequality that exists in the USA.

When I was 18 I went to study at university. I went to a small town called Northfield in Minnesota. It was even farther north than Chicago. The winters were very cold! When I finished university, I lived in Minneapolis with 5 friends in a crazy old house. We set up a music room in the basement and used to try to write songs. They weren't very good but it was a lot of fun.

Then in 1992, I came to Barcelona. I studied to become and English teacher. I loved the city and went for long walks everyday exploring the parks and narrow streets. I decided I wanted to live in Spain for a few years.

A few years have turned into 16 years! I went to Madrid in 1993 and started working as a teacher in a language academy. Now I am a mother, a teacher, an editor and writer. I am happy with my life but I'm very busy. I think that when my children are older, I'll travel again. I love to see new places, try new food, go for walks in busy streets where I don't understand the language, take pictures and get lost in the world around me.

Runaway Train

Long ago in the 1990s when you were just little kids (or not even born yet!), the Minneapolis based alternative rock band SOUL ASYLUM came out with the song RUNAWAY TRAIN. As we have read about runaways in Chapter Two of English Alive, I thought you might like to listen to the song.


Here is the video from 1993.