Brent Warner (00:02.283)
Are your icebreakers a bit dry? Dreading boring self-introductions? Let’s talk about how we can revive our souls by not only breaking but crushing ice with new approaches to old problems on this episode of the DIESOL Podcast.

Ixchell Reyes (00:24.69)
Welcome to the DIESOL podcast where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Ixchell Reyes, teacher trainer, and I’m here with the awesome, the fantastic, the still Apple user, author of TESOL’s ELT toolkit and EdTech for Multilingual Learners, the only Brent Warner. Hey, Brent, happy February.

Brent Warner (00:40.167)
Ha ha ha ha ha.

Brent Warner (00:48.375)
Hey, thank you. Yay. I don’t think I’m the only Brent Warner, because I see Google Alerts for other Brent Warner. Yeah, there we go. All right. Yeah. So happy February. And we are talking about a topic today that we did about like a year and a half ago or so. We did an episode on some icebreakers. But then you’re like, hey, I did this workshop.

Ixchell Reyes (00:57.649)
What? You’re the only brain warner I know, so mm.

Ixchell Reyes (01:10.524)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (01:17.153)
that work? Tell me a little bit about that.

Ixchell Reyes (01:18.183)
Yeah, it’s just I wanted to talk about icebreakers and warmups that I use in class because I’m a teacher trainer. So I want my teachers to be excited about that day, the first day of class, and I don’t want them to dread having to do the self-introduction. I got good feedback on it. So I thought it would be kind of cool to revisit.

Brent Warner (01:35.989)
Mmm.

Brent Warner (01:41.121)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, I was like, when was the last time we did? So even for me, I’m like, it’s a year and a half or however long it’s been, you know, we’re always like, we can’t talk about it because we talked about it seven years ago. It’s like, now hold on, can, we can do this. So, so yeah, I think it’s good. And you got some great ideas in here. So are we ready to jump into it?

Ixchell Reyes (01:49.192)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (01:53.351)
Yeah

Excellent.

Ixchell Reyes (02:04.241)
Ready with my heart and my chocolates.

Brent Warner (02:05.364)
Alright, you got chocolate hearts all over the place. Alright, let’s go!

Ixchell Reyes (02:13.991)
All right, so why is it worth talking about warmups again? And why is it worth just talking about warmups in general? Well, I think that the Brandt, you and I constantly talk about how it’s so important to lower the effective filter over and over. We say this all the time, right? And that’s because we need to create a friendly atmosphere. We need to build rapport. We need to build connection because all of those lead to better learning outcomes. And we know that memory is stored longer if the

Brent Warner (02:21.387)
Hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (02:43.877)
brain is relaxed, right? Hence crushing that ice. So these activities might

Brent Warner (02:46.311)
Hmm. Yes, indeed. We’re upgrading from icebreakers to icecrushers, right? That’s the game today. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s the next level. So there we go. Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (02:54.727)
Because it feels good to crush, you know? Next level. So, yes, for the students who are in your class, these activities might be new, but often we forget that students in our class might go to another teacher the following hour or the next day and the same activity might be repetitive for them. And I remember as a student, I used to hate the first day, not only because people couldn’t pronounce my first name correctly.

Brent Warner (03:15.019)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (03:22.939)
And not only because they say, I am afraid of butchering your name, but because we would inevitably have to do a self-introduction and what that happened, when that happens, it just becomes canned. And with our language learners, it’s a memorized thing. So, also if you’re a teacher that’s been teaching for a long time, you’ve probably done this activity over and over and over again. So you’re kind of like in…

Brent Warner (03:26.891)
Mm.

Brent Warner (03:40.608)
Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Ixchell Reyes (03:50.798)
in autopilot mode and I think it’s, you need to practice the habit of twisting things up a little bit and enhancing what you’re doing so that they’re also enjoyable for you. And so while some of these activities are not inherently bad, they can get stale over time and we don’t want our teachers to be burnt out, right? So.

Brent Warner (04:14.047)
Yeah, yeah. Have you ever had it? I’ve had this because, you know, our students in our program, depending like they might be with us for two or three years kind of as they’re cycling through or getting used to everything. And so like I’ve had students say, yeah, I did the same thing, you know, in my other class or, you know, I’m like,

Ixchell Reyes (04:20.262)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (04:29.798)
you

Brent Warner (04:30.219)
You know, and so and so then you’re kind of realizing, okay, well, they probably also did the same thing back in their home countries when they were learning, right? Their teachers, they were using those things, their first exposures. A lot of these are like variations on, well, the originals are classics, right? And so again, yeah, they have purpose and they have a meaning. But I think what you’re getting to with the way you’re talking through these things is like, you can still use them, but you can make them fresh and make them more enjoyable for everybody.

Ixchell Reyes (04:38.437)
Hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (04:46.191)
Right.

Ixchell Reyes (04:57.444)
Yeah, I think one of the issues is low prep, right? Teachers never have extra time. So if you’re already spending your other time for the core activity, you don’t have a lot of time to spend on that warmup. So it doesn’t take a lot. just takes, I think my recipe as always, it’s a small twist and a fresh purpose and then you have reinvented that same activity.

Brent Warner (05:03.103)
Mmm.

Brent Warner (05:22.493)
Alright, well I think we’re ready to get into it, so what do you got for us?

Ixchell Reyes (05:27.076)
Well, self-introductions. My students always roll their eyes. And again, no, it becomes this memorized, robotic, meaningless, monotonous, automatic, boring introduction. And so this is not mind-blowing. But again, introduce a partner instead. When you’re asking someone to ask questions and they’re no longer focusing on themselves, and so it lowers their effective filter because they’re having to ask someone else to talk about themselves.

Brent Warner (05:29.395)
you

Brent Warner (05:40.938)
You

Ixchell Reyes (05:55.915)
then they also have to report that, right? So that is using third person singular and reported speech. And right off the bat, the teacher can get a feel for how well that student can introduce someone. And so again, many languages do not have that third person or the gendered pronouns. So that’s a chance for the teacher to already start gathering information. Plus it’s a lot more

Brent Warner (06:22.109)
Hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (06:25.059)
you know, what usually happens is the student forgets one thing that the partner said, so the partner pipes in and corrects that partner. So now it becomes this live exchange. And so it’s a little bit more natural than just this memorized introduction of there are five family members in my family, my dog, my mom, my cat. So.

Brent Warner (06:45.706)
Yeah, well, and that part that part’s a big deal, right? Is like, because then you’ve got for sure you’ve got two people kind of focusing in and then I don’t want to call it conflict, but when there’s like, corrections to be made, then also the rest of the class is more likely to listen to and hear like, oh, what am I hearing? What’s being you know, it

Ixchell Reyes (06:49.358)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (07:03.946)
there’s kind of a human likelihood to listen to two people talking or clarifying with each other than there is to just one person kind of droning on with the same facts over and over again. So simple.

tiny little shift and I know a lot of our veteran teachers are already doing something like this, but if you’re kind of newer and you’re kind of like, just introduce yourself, it gets hard too because they’re standing like in front of the class and then you’ve got each student talking for, let’s say you’ve got a class of 20 students and each student talks for two minutes, then it’s like, well, that whole class is gone and it’s all just been one person over and over talking to each other. So it gets a bit much pretty quickly.

Ixchell Reyes (07:21.23)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (07:34.743)
No.

Ixchell Reyes (07:38.029)
Right.

Ixchell Reyes (07:42.53)
Right. Okay. So the next activity that again, I roll my eyes all the time because we sometimes have them at whenever I go to other workshops and they want us to participate and you know, teachers are terrible at participating when it’s their turn. Not always, but it’s like, man, they want us to give two truths and a lie. And it’s like, okay. And so yes, this can be fun.

Brent Warner (07:59.41)
You

Ixchell Reyes (08:11.97)
But you can also change it up. You can now focus on also using it as an activity to see what the students know. So yes, it’s an icebreaker, but also can sort of piggyback as a warmup. So you can now have students give two truths and a lie about their major. So if they’re university students and they’re going into, I don’t know, biology.

or microbiology, or there’s going to be students that already know a lot from their own knowledge back home. And so now we are forced to really listen to what they’re saying because maybe we don’t know about that major. You could also talk about their specialties. Maybe they had jobs back home and they can talk about jobs. You could talk about the content from the previous week or the previous semester if your students were, for example, supposed to be studying

Brent Warner (08:45.995)
Mm.

Ixchell Reyes (09:08.578)
I don’t know. Generally teachers know what they’ve seen the previous semester or the previous class, what those goals for them were. Have them give two truths and a lie about that or just topics, make up topics. It doesn’t even have to be that. It can be like, okay, I want two truths and a lie about going to the movies.

Brent Warner (09:29.704)
Okay, yeah. So basically you’re saying here it’s pulling it away from them having to talk about themselves as a person so much as they can focus on things more of the things that they’re interested in or things that they know about or whatever it is. less so yeah yeah yeah for sure.

Ixchell Reyes (09:40.173)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (09:46.21)
Mm-hmm.

So you’re going to have to use more vocabulary.

Brent Warner (09:52.753)
And it doesn’t really matter too, like my first thought as well, okay, but how are people gonna be able to figure out what the answer is if they’re not a, know, bio engineer or something like that. And it’s like, well, okay, but they’re not gonna know the real answer about the person themselves either, right? So they’re all, it’s all the same thing, right? So now you’re just kind of giving the challenge and, but you still gotta talk about what you love about, right?

Ixchell Reyes (10:00.419)
specialist.

Ixchell Reyes (10:06.21)
Doesn’t matter.

Ixchell Reyes (10:13.005)
So if the goal is to really get a point for guessing the lie, then yes, I suppose that doesn’t work. But guess what? I always think of it as it’s an opportunity to help them speak where they’re lowering the effective filter so they’re not nervous. So now if they’re trying to have a conversation about something that’s totally silly, I don’t know, two truths about a horse and a lie about a horse.

Brent Warner (10:34.407)
Mm.

Ixchell Reyes (10:38.453)
I don’t know, I may not know anything about it. I may end up lying the whole time or switch it up due to lies and a truth, but it’s a conversation.

Brent Warner (10:49.095)
How many lies about horses do you know, Eshel? That’s the real question.

Ixchell Reyes (10:55.411)
gosh. Ponies are horses.

Brent Warner (10:56.584)
So you might have to, if you’re giving these things, you might have to give people like a minute or two for prep time, right? Of course, because it’s less time for them to…

Ixchell Reyes (11:06.955)
Sure, absolutely. Yeah, and just if you were going to be talking about yourself, you also need time because most of the time people tend to want to say the truth. So they have to really think creatively to create that lie, right? So you would need time. So absolutely. Even if you’re going to do the regular two truths and a lie.

Brent Warner (11:19.034)
Hmm.

Brent Warner (11:25.829)
Yeah. Like horses can do, can swim up to two miles or something like that. So we’ll need some pictures of swimming horses for this episode.

Ixchell Reyes (11:32.838)
Mmm, horses can swim.

Brent Warner (11:43.068)
Okay, cool. Yeah, so I get that. then, so just a little shifts, right? We’re not talking to anything big, nothing major here, but a quick little shift to take that same theme, the concept works for it. And then we’re just kind of saying, Hey, what if you just did this little, little adjustment, a little tweak to it and make that a kind of a fresh way for the students to approach it without saying, I just did the same thing in my last class, you know, yesterday or whatever else it is. So.

Ixchell Reyes (11:47.169)
Mm.

Ixchell Reyes (12:03.426)
And the best part is when the students think, here we go, we’re going to do that activity. And they sort of get that look, that glint in their eye that they just guessed what you’re about to do. But then when you give them the twist, they’re like, aha. And I’ve had multiple students tell me over time, you’re a very unpredictable teacher. I thought I had everyone figured out, but you surprise us every time. I guess that’s a good thing.

Brent Warner (12:17.735)
Mmm.

Brent Warner (12:23.775)
Ha ha.

Brent Warner (12:27.533)
Ha ha ha!

Yeah, yeah, Very cool, okay. What else you got?

Ixchell Reyes (12:35.315)
Okay, so here’s another one. It’s the typical grid or bingo sheet that says, find someone who has never been to another country or find someone who has flown an airplane, like actually flown the airplane, not flown in an airplane. And that’s okay. That’s okay. But teachers don’t take the time often to create new questions that are fresh. And so I think that those activities just tend to

Brent Warner (12:41.828)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (12:57.254)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (13:05.311)
become repetitive. And so I think it might be better to do, okay, talk to a partner or and find someone find three things that you have in common, but then add categories. let’s say, Brian, I want you to go find or pick a partner, pick someone or you assign someone. And I want you to talk to that partner until I say stop. And I want you to find three things you have in common.

Brent Warner (13:07.119)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (13:33.225)
related to music, the category is music. So now that will start a conversation. It may start very superficial, but then that’s gonna lead into a little bit more depth. And then I’m gonna say, stop. Maybe you found three things in common. Maybe you found one, maybe you found none, but I’m gonna say, switch to another partner. You’re gonna do the same thing, but now I’m going to change the category. And I might do that three times and then ask people to report.

Brent Warner (13:37.081)
Okay. Okay.

Ixchell Reyes (14:02.174)
what they found out about their classmates. So now you’ll have to introduce here maybe two or three people or talk in a group and share what you learned and that you’re more likely to remember whom you met and what you learned about them from just limiting the amount of information.

Brent Warner (14:21.774)
Yeah, so it’s not like, so the game is no longer trying to run around and talk to as many people as possible as quickly as possible as to get a few people a little bit more depth on a single topic. So that might be, and I like the idea that you just give it is like a loose theme. So music, food, movies, whatever, right? Yeah. And so then they could

Ixchell Reyes (14:29.291)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (14:33.023)
Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (14:39.24)
Everybody loves music, something about music. They can talk about music.

Brent Warner (14:44.9)
Yeah, they can figure out where they want to go with it from there or what they’re going to ask each other about it from there. And as compared to, do you have three brothers and sisters? Yes, no, okay, I’m done. Right. And then, and then move on to the next one.

Ixchell Reyes (14:55.826)
Yeah, yeah. And again, it’s all about what you want. You’re in control. So you can say, well, I want my students, if they’re all from different countries, I want them to talk about holidays they recently celebrated and talk a little, have a little bit of cultural exchange. So I’m going to say holidays in your country. Let them talk for three minutes and see three things that you have in common about holidays. Okay, they’re probably going to talk about big parties, maybe weddings, maybe cakes, maybe birthdays, maybe.

Brent Warner (15:14.286)
Mm.

Brent Warner (15:19.246)
Nice.

Ixchell Reyes (15:24.636)
a national day, and that’s going to lead to more English and also listening to someone. Plus again, if the goal is to get them to relax, to build rapport, to build connection, and to lower the effective filter, then that’s already creating that and community, a sense of community.

Brent Warner (15:45.059)
Nice, it, like a lot, very cool.

Brent Warner (15:53.549)
Who’s going on this one? Me, alright. Yeah, we’re switching things up. Alright. You always keep me on my toes. Here we go. So, hey everybody. I have a pretty busy spring semester here. Several presentations, so I thought we’d just share if you’re able to attend any of these, if you happen to be around.

Ixchell Reyes (15:54.816)
Ew! We’re switching it up today. Unexpected.

Brent Warner (16:17.571)
very soon coming up so since this episode is coming out on the 2nd of February, on February 5th there’s an online event, Lunch with Larek. Larek is the Los Angeles Regional Adult Education Consortium I believe, L-A-R-A-E-C, and I’ll be talking about teaching in the age of AI with them. Then a couple days later on February 7th I am at OCCUE TechFest.

Ixchell Reyes (16:41.513)
OCCUE!

Brent Warner (16:42.541)
Yeah, and that’ll be fun. So that’ll be vibe coding with AI is what I’m doing over there. And then yeah, we will. actually, I actually

Ixchell Reyes (16:48.549)
we need to do an episode on

Brent Warner (16:53.765)
Well, this is a little spoiler, but I met someone who’s doing some really interesting stuff and I would love to get her on the show to talk about her work with it too. okay. So then March 26th, we mentioned this before, but I will be at TESOL and I do have a, my time is an 8 a.m. schedule, I think on Thursday the 26th, I believe. So 10 tools to lighten teachers’ loads, bring a big old cup of coffee if you’re gonna be there, because that is early on, one of the first ones of the day.

Ixchell Reyes (16:59.487)
Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Ixchell Reyes (17:05.947)
Mm-hmm. Coming up.

Brent Warner (17:23.738)
But then, I was…

Ixchell Reyes (17:25.576)
but they fill up, so get there, it’ll be worth it.

Brent Warner (17:29.218)
Yeah, and then the last one is I was I’ve been invited to be a keynote speaker at the JALT CALL Conference. So that’s very exciting. So that’s the Japan Association for Language Teaching and CALL is, you know, computer assisted language learning. And so they really do an excellent conference. I was involved with them a little bit while my year over there in Japan recently. Great group of teachers.

Ixchell Reyes (17:37.246)
You

Ixchell Reyes (17:44.286)
Hmm?

Brent Warner (17:58.052)
truly excellent conference. was so impressed with how with how well it went and so yeah and so it’s it’s really I’m really happy to be invited to go there and speak with them. Great teachers, great crew, so if anybody has the way to make it happen and you want to go to Japan for you want an excuse to go to Japan JALT CALL is a great one and that is in mid-June, June 12th to the 14th.

Ixchell Reyes (18:01.35)
I remember you talked a lot about that.

Ixchell Reyes (18:22.972)
You got time to get those funds.

Brent Warner (18:25.228)
some time.

Ixchell Reyes (18:29.129)
All right, so let’s go on to our other half of warmups that could use a twist. again, oftentimes you have speed, they’re called speed dating type of interviews. I never really liked that idea ever, even as a student, I hated it. but what I hated about them is that the questions are just boring. Maybe if the questions were a little bit better.

Brent Warner (18:36.386)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (18:43.882)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brent Warner (18:56.684)
Mmm.

Ixchell Reyes (18:58.718)
It may be okay. And I know they do this also at conferences where they want you to get to know someone next to you and they want to have interaction. But the reality is you’re not going to talk to those people after. And if you really want to make a friend, I mean, especially if it’s a really large, large group, you really want to have questions that lead you to talk more, laugh more, connect more. But for my students, I would do the same, but instead maybe have something like would you rather, but with silly questions.

So for example, and Brent, I have this question for you. Would you rather time travel or teleport?

Brent Warner (19:31.808)
Okay.

I’m gonna go with, well because of the ethical implications of time travel and how it might change the world and also the butterfly effect and all that stuff, I’m gonna go with teleportation.

Ixchell Reyes (19:47.602)
You know what? I think I’d do teleportation too, because that means I can see the people who are alive right now who matter to me and I could just go and see them. I could also go spy on people. Okay, bye mom.

Brent Warner (19:56.557)
That’s true. You just like swing the door open, hey mom! And she’s like, what the? Where’d you come from? Yeah, I gotta go. I gotta go back to work. Yeah, that was…

Ixchell Reyes (20:08.273)
But you can have questions like this.

Brent Warner (20:10.263)
That would be really great, yeah. I could see the value of it. So you gave a couple of other questions as well. They’re kind of silly, but I like them, right? So you had on here, would you rather always have to sing instead of speaking or always have to dance instead of walking? Which one would you choose?

Ixchell Reyes (20:29.31)
Yep. So what’s going to happen? Hi. Well, I’m not a good singer and I’m not a good dancer. So I guess I would rather torture people with maybe, okay, more exercise if you’re dancing, which is what other people have said. What would you rather? I don’t know. More movement. I’d get in my 10,000 steps. Dance.

Brent Warner (20:35.047)
huh.

Brent Warner (20:45.716)
really? I would choose the dance one because you can sit down and talk to people but anytime you’re communicating with someone you’re always singing they would slap you right? mean like eventually this would not be a fun interaction and so…

Ixchell Reyes (20:58.577)
Yeah

And this would inevitably be an episode that would be sung terribly.

Brent Warner (21:11.938)
That’s right, we would have to auto-tune this entire episode and sing all our ideas. Alright, so… Wait, you don’t like that? See, so the answer is there. But yeah, that’s way more fun, right? It gets people talking about things right away. There’s no kind of, you know…

Ixchell Reyes (21:21.468)
god, please no.

Ixchell Reyes (21:30.588)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (21:34.298)
And they’re unexpected things, right? If it’s unexpected, the brain remembers more because it’s unexpected. And that’s the thing I like about adding a twist to something traditional. again, another twist on this is talk about useless superpowers. And then which one would you rather? So if you do a search for useless superpowers, you will find some amusing ones.

Brent Warner (21:51.233)
Mmm.

Ixchell Reyes (21:59.961)
The one I often like to show my students is would you rather communicate with fruit, the ability to communicate with fruit or control the remote control. So what do think students choose?

Brent Warner (22:17.986)
So they gotta choose communicate with fruit, right?

Ixchell Reyes (22:20.016)
Yeah, they choose communicate with fruit and then that usually leads to well, what about communicating with food? No, I wouldn’t want to communicate with food. Why? Because then you’re going to have your little lamb that’s about to be sacrificed before before Eid and you’re going to feel sorry for it. So, but that’s more conversation.

Brent Warner (22:35.338)
yeah.

So they’re just arguing for vegetarianism at that point.

Ixchell Reyes (22:44.829)
But then I’ve had students say, no, I’m a couch potato and they’ll get a chance to use that idiom and I’ll get a chance to see, they know that idiom. And they’ll say, I’m too lazy and it’s too cold to get up. I just want the remote control. And my child loses the remote control all the time. So I just want the ability to have it in my hand at any moment. So that’s way more talking than the boring questions that you would repeat with speed dating, which at the end of that speed dating session, you’re not going to remember what people said.

Brent Warner (22:51.266)
Hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (23:13.862)
You just sort of met people.

Brent Warner (23:13.919)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Alright, so we’re gonna need to come up with a longer list of these, or we’ll go find, there’ll be lists online, but come up with a good list of these, maybe we can put a few into the show notes as well, because these are fun and silly to think about for sure.

Ixchell Reyes (23:31.1)
And then last, this is kind of a cool one. My colleague, Becky, had these news clips of just silly news clips. One was fish that were raining from the sky, like literal fish raining because at that time they had gotten caught up in currents, air currents, and the water pulled them away. And so they were falling from the sky. So there was a news report on them and

Brent Warner (23:58.196)
Fishnado, love it.

Ixchell Reyes (24:00.955)
And then the other news story was a hundred goats that had escaped from a, I don’t know, a local farm and they had made their way into a neighborhood. And so of course it turned into this whole just funny scenario where the goats were eating people’s plants and also kids were coming out to pet the kids. Ha ha ha. Yeah. And

Brent Warner (24:21.876)
Hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (24:24.811)
And so the goal of this activity was to have students practice making predictions about, okay, what’s gonna happen next? Or talk about how it happened or how it could have been prevented. If you’re targeting grammar structures, just as a warmup. And yes, it’s an icebreaker because people are talking about these funny stories.

Brent Warner (24:39.712)
Mmm.

Ixchell Reyes (24:45.338)
But you could use them for different grammar points using passive voice. So if they’re listening to the news report, because these were videos and they were funny, there’s a lot of context in the videos because there was pictures. So even if the news reporter was speaking fast, you could still understand from the pictures. So change the active to the passive voice, report the story to someone. And you can have other weird or odd news stories, preferably recent ones.

NPR has, I think it’s a strange news section. So in their section, you can go and find out what’s recently been happening.

Brent Warner (25:26.645)
Looking at this right now. There’s a pretty cool section in here. Look at this one. A zoo in Denmark asked patrons to donate their pets, not as attractions, but for food.

Ixchell Reyes (25:38.99)
I saw that! Yes I think I saw that! no don’t encourage people

Brent Warner (25:43.302)
It’s like, hey, bored of your pet? here we go, give it to the zoo. And they’ve got a giant picture of tigers on this.

Ixchell Reyes (25:53.688)
Well, that would make for good story later in life. When I was a kid.

Brent Warner (25:56.948)
Yes. My dad gave our dog away to the zoo. okay, but yes, it certainly would be talkable about for a long time inside of there. that’s strange news at NPR, but there’s other sites out there. Yeah, yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (26:00.91)
Hehehehehe

Ixchell Reyes (26:13.476)
Very low stakes, they’re very low stakes activities in general, all of these, and they’re not new. I’m sure that many of our listeners might have already done some of this.

Brent Warner (26:21.916)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it’s just kind of a reminder, hey, you can mix them up. You can switch, you know, if you’re thinking about doing a traditional activity, maybe you can just, you know, swap a little bit of it just to make sure, hey, imagine that your students probably have done that basic activity in the class many, many times, even in this term, right? And so how can you kind of make a little shift to it to make it more engaging, a little bit more interesting and fun for the students? I think that’s a good approach.

Ixchell Reyes (26:24.964)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Warner (26:54.676)
Alright, it is time for our fun finds! So, Ixchell, I think we’re both going music this time around, so what do you got for us?

Ixchell Reyes (26:58.925)
Yay!

Ixchell Reyes (27:04.781)
I got two musicians. think we need to find music that uplifts us and also helps us express how we’re feeling. And so I found two really awesome musicians. One is called Earth to Eve. And the other one is Ximena Castro. Her name is spelled with an X and it’ll be on the show notes. We’ll link them. But both of them have done an excellent job at creating

Brent Warner (27:20.223)
Mm.

Brent Warner (27:25.107)
Okay.

Ixchell Reyes (27:34.074)
artistic material music in this case that represents what’s going on right now and also helps to build up rather than tear down because we all need a little bit of hope. So check them out on their Instagrams or on the YouTubes.

Brent Warner (27:45.416)
Nice.

Brent Warner (27:49.011)
Yeah, I listened to some of that Earth to Eve in the pre-show and it’s pretty rad. I put it on my subscribed list for sure. mine is, I don’t know how to pronounce this. So it’s a Japanese band and it’s called Sum.

Ixchell Reyes (27:52.249)
pretty good.

Ixchell Reyes (27:56.173)
Cool. What do you got?

Brent Warner (28:05.927)
and then equal marks lines or I’m not sure because sometimes these Japanese words that overlap with English like is it so may or is it so some yeah so anyways it’s S O E and then an equal marks and then L I N E Z but they are they have this really cool like modern beatbox shamisen music so if you’re into the shamisen and like you know like the traditional Japanese three-stringed you know guitar instrument and then it’s

Ixchell Reyes (28:10.169)
They’re like puns or like a double.

Brent Warner (28:35.84)
And then they’ve got like this beatboxing like dance music underneath it with it’s really rad sounding and so So if you’re interested in a little bit of world music modern modern world music Very cool. I’ll call it some lines for now, but but we’ll have a link there and they’ve got these cool videos too They’re kind of like they’re kind of these cool like epic kind of music videos going on where they’re like

dancing in front of like a cloudy Mount Fuji or you know all sorts of different things so yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (29:03.948)
God, it’s just artistically beautiful. Yes, they sound amazing, but it’s also appealing to the eye. So it’s interesting to look at.

Brent Warner (29:11.474)
Yeah, it’s a full project. It’s not just being musicians. It seems like there’s a lot of stuff going on with them. So yeah, I’ll call it some lines for now.

Ixchell Reyes (29:15.788)
Mm-hmm.

Ixchell Reyes (29:26.297)
For the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org/133. We’ll get it right this time on the show card. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram at @DIESOLpod. A shout out to all of our new audience members on YouTube. We’ve received a lot of feedback there. Thank you for watching there. And we’ve received a lot of feedback on the video episodes. So thank you for watching. We appreciate that you’re sticking all the way through.

Brent Warner (29:33.726)
Hahaha.

Brent Warner (29:52.027)
Yeah, yeah. Who knew that people wanted to see our faces so much? But there we are. So you can find me on the socials at @BrentGWarner

Ixchell Reyes (30:04.726)
And you can find me on Instagram at @ixy_pixy_ that’s I x y underscore P i x y underscore. Two underscores.

Brent Warner (30:15.005)
double underscores. Alright, that’s it for today everybody, we will see you in a couple weeks, happy Valentine’s Day for those of you celebrating. Yeah, we’re all celebrating in one way or another. Happy Friend and Frankenstein Day. Frankenstein Day. I don’t know, I have no idea. See you all next time around, goodbye!

Ixchell Reyes (30:26.624)
It’s a friend- it’s friendship, okay? It doesn’t have to just be…

Ixchell Reyes (30:33.31)
What? Enough! Bye!