Indirect speech

This is a point of grammar that many students understand as an exercise to translate direct speech into indirect speech. Although this is a good way of learning I must say it's useless if you don't understand that it's much more frequent in our common language than we could think and not just a grammar exercise.
We use indirect speech to rephrase what you or other people have said before, especially in sentences or situations such as this one:
Yesterday I phoned my mother to ask her what she wanted to do for her birthday and she said she didn't fancy doing anything special but I suggested going to a new African restaurant. She accepted the suggestion and asked me if I could organise everything and I said I'd do it as soon as I could. She reminded me to call my brother Peter but I asked her to do it herself. She agreed and said she'd do it that afternoon. 
If you want to work with this grammar point you can use these websites:

• http://esl.about.com/od/grammarintermediate/a/reported_speech.htm :with an explanation and at the bottom you’ve got some exercises of transformation and a list of reported verbs.
• http://esl.about.com/od/grammarchants/a/l_repspeech.htm : this is a page with resources for the teacher. There are a couple of exercises to be done at class.

Remember you can find some more exercises on your own on the internet. See you in class.