Meeting Points

Dave's ESL Café is free and it doesn't require any subscripition. The activities available for students are a bit boring and repetitive.
For teachers, it has a link "Idea Cookbook" which turned out to be the only interesting thing, presenting teaching ideas.
edHelper.com is not free and it requires subscription. We tried to do a word search and we found out that it requires subscription. As a result, we weren't able to fully explore this website.
edna.edu.au is free and it requires no subscription. It's a kind of directory as it leads us to other links where we can get various information. As an information source, we consider it rather useful to do school projects, although it doesn't offer any pratical exercises.
Education world is free and it doesn't require any subscription. It gives us the possibility of doing interactive activities and these are printable. These activities are extremely varied, for instance  "the coloring calendar" which we tried to do.
enchanted learning.com requires subscription. However, some activities we went through are printable.

Mass Media Hands-on

After analysing the news on the royal wedding in Britain, we came to the conclusion that the american newspapers (Newsweek and NPR) have the news shown on the homepage. Both have a critical approach on this topic without giving it much importance, while the British BBC and The Times deal with this matter in a more serious way, giving much more details about the ceremony. With the exception of The Times, they don't focus much on relevant pictures although all of them are different and so are their captions. None of the four newspapers make use of direct speech and the stories have different lenghts and so are their beginnings. The facts reported on the homepages are not the same as they emphasize diffrerent aspects of the news.

Oxford University Press

After analysing Oxford University Press, we came to the conclusion that it's free even though it requires a free registration to use some resources. Other resources are available even without any registration, for example "Natural Grammar Online". It provides grammar, listening and writing exercises, including the final score on each of them. It's possible to use this website with students as we found it rather apealling and motivating for them.

On which concerns to Encyclopedias, we selected "Kids Encyclopedia" After analysing this encyclopedia, we noticed it's not totally free as it requires a paid subscription to have access to further information, that is, it shows parts of each information or activity and it asks for a paid subscripion to have access to the rest of it.However, it gives a free 30-day-trial.
It only offers printable webquizzes, e.g. "The American Civil War". Otherwise, in order to do them online, we must have a paid subscripition.
We experienced some difficulty when exploring this website for it keeps continuously changing its main page.

The Phrase Finder Dictionary

Through this dictionary we were able to find the meaning of the following idiomatic phrases:
"Loose one's MARBLES":
"Let the CAT out of the BAG"
"Live in the FAST lane"
"Be off one's ROCKER", *
"FLIP WIG"
 "Burn the CANDLE at both ENDS"

**As we couldn't find the meaning of this expression in "The Phrase Finder Dictionary", we found it in "The Free Dictionary".N

"Work with nursery rhymes"

When going through nursery rhymes, we found out interesting rhyming exercises for ESL students. Besides a large variety of nursery rhymes, we also noticed that this website includes a rather interesting  explanation about the lyrics, history and origins of each nursery rhyme, ilustrated with symbols. Among them we have decided to include this one as an example:

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,What a beautiful Pussy you *, you *, you are,What a beautiful Pussy you are."
Pussy said to the Owl "You elegant fowl,How charmingly sweet you sing.
O let us be married, too long we have tarried;But what shall we do for a ring

 They sailed away, for a year and a  day,

             To the land where the Bong-tree grows,
             And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood            With a ring at the end of his *, his *, his nose,
            With a ring at the end of his nose.            "Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?"
             Said the Piggy, "I will"
            So they took it away, and were married next day            By the Turkey who lives on the _hill.            They dined on mince, and slices of quince,            Which they ate with a runcible spoon.
            And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand.           They danced by the light of the *, the *, the moon,            They danced by the light of the moon.