A good, a really good or an absolutely amazing first day?

Finally, it's summer! Even here in bonnie Edinburgh we get some hot and sunny days. So, what's the best you can do with your free time? Exactly, being part of the summer intensive course 2018 at the Edinburgh Experience. Today we started with two of our intensive courses: Listening & Speaking Skills A2/B1 level and CLIL-Bilingual Teachers B2+ level.

By Kim Laura Kühne

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​Even though I'm not a teacher, I'm joining the CLIL-Bilingual Teacher course because I've been  a passionate student looking for something new to learn for my whole life.
To kick off the day we checked our general knowledge about Scotland and Edinburgh. For example, did you know, that Princes Street Gardens used to be loch or that the Gaelic word Uisge Beatha means water of life? Those and other interesting facts helped us to use some language of speculation. I mean, I have no idea if you have ever seen Braveheart but I'd guess that you might think, that most of the film was filmed in Scotland. See, it's that easy to use some language of speculation. I just managed to use three expressions in one sentence - I'm so proud of myself. And for your information, Braveheart was mostly filmed in Ireland.
Another aspect of the morning class were adjectives and modifiers or how to make your language more interesting. For example there is nothing wrong when you say "I had a good day" but it sounds way better if you use a modifier and say "I had a really good day" or use a strong adjective like "I had a amazing day". Or even better, combine a modifier with a strong adjective to "I had an absolutely amazing day". That's much better than only good food, doesn't it?

This all was preparation for our afternoon program - a visit to the Scottish National Galleries. We had descriptions of ten paintings which we needed to find in the Gallery and were discussed later on. Thanks to the morning lessons we tried to avoid boring sentences like "that's a nice painting". We were able to say more interesting sentences like "I really like this painting. It shows a lot of details. The skin of the lady is so white, I'd imagine she must come from a very wealthy family ". 
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Do you know which painting I tried to describe? Have a look at all the paintings we were talking about in class. What do you think about them? Which one is your favourite and why? Do you know any fascinating paintings from your country? Tell us about them!

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