Grocery Shopping on the Internet

Hi, students of the seniors' class!

Teacher Joleen at the Sarnia YMCA has made this excellent tutorial about shopping for groceries on the Internet for pickup. In the city where I am now, I can pay $9.99 USD for delivery, which is not bad if I am buying two weeks' worth of groceries at a time. I also tip the Instacart picker / driver.

Take a look!

Tell me how you are doing. Leave me a comment below. Don't forget to add your name after your comment!

Kelly

Our Urban Foraging Expedition

Hello, students of the seniors' class.

We had a very successful urban foraging expedition, didn't we?

We learned a new word: ubiquitous. Plantain is ubiquitous.

Finally! Purslane!

Champion forager Saiying

Eyes to the ground

Back to class with our bounties

What we found

Catcher of big fish and big purslane

Here are some recipes for Burdock:


A Japanese Recipe for Burdock (video)

How to eat the stems and stalks (video)

More Burdock recipes (text)

Here you can learn about the benefits of dandelion tea.

Our Nutrition Label Presentations

Riming and Manlin: Milk Comparison, part 1

Riming: Milk Comparison, part 2

Xiumin and Caixia: Choosing Breakfast

Xiumin and Caixia: ending

Nabil and Raja: What's in Your Snack?

Saiying and Kelly: Three Surprises

Awatif and Marhamat: Five Kinds of Yogourt

Nahla and Saadallah: Ritz or Tabouli?

Read about white rice versus brown rice.

Reading Nutrition Labels

This is an excellent video to reinforce the concepts we are learning. This may be an American video. I notice her "rule of thumb" is just a bit different from the one we learn in Canada.

Turn on subtitles and maximize the window. You can also slow down her rate of speech, remember?



Here is another good video: https://youtu.be/fJsF9q2E9do

This video addresses whether cooking fruits and veggies kills the vitamins.

Happy Holidays 2018

We wrapped up 2018 with a class potluck, speeches, games, song, and breaking bread together. I hope to see everyone again in the new year.

Eat Safer Fish

I'm sure you all did great on your reading assessments. I'll mark them on the weekend.

Meanwhile, here is a spelling test. Log in with your username and the password.

Cheers!

Get Ready for Fishing Season!

Hello, students of the seniors' class.

This week we are learning how to get information about suggested servings per month of fish caught in the Detroit River based on our weight, fish species, cleaning, and cooking methods.

Here is the video that will be the basis of our listening assessment.
https://youtu.be/cLUu85zrRHA

Cheers!

Keeping Your Garden Watered

Hello, students of the seniors' class!

Are you enjoying this HOT, HOT Windsor summer?

I know many of you have gardens, and it is difficult to keep them from wilting in this crazy hot weather we are having. I have to water my container tomato plants three times per day! The ones in the ground only need it once a day. Also, my coleus and basil on the deck begin to wilt by 3:00 p.m.

So I am setting up some slow-drip irrigation systems using old pop bottles and other plastic jugs so the plants can get a tiny bit of water all day long.

How are your gardens doing? Did you plant the seeds we exchanged this past spring? Did they grow? Please leave a comment below. So far I have harvested four zucchini and about ten okra. Very soon I will have tomatoes--Druzba and Tiny Tim. It's my first year to successfully grown anything from seed, so I'm quite happy!

Here are some links for you.

Drip system above ground in garden. (video)

Drip Irrigation - WikiHow

Try to stay cool!

Shopping for Food

Hello, students of the seniors' class!

This week we learned how to describe food by packaging, by taste, smell, and texture. I brought in four foods that you tasted and described: dark chocolate, wasabi flavoured roasted seaweed snack, Garam Masala snack, and a breakfast cereal. We used words such as "creamy, tart, crunchy, crisp, umami, bittersweet," and "spicy."

By the end of the week, we were able to describe a food from back home to a classmate from another culture. SaiYing shared about glutinous rice balls filled with bean paste. Tareq shared about Pacha, while Nabil told us about a traditional Iraqi way of cooking fish near an open fire. I told you about Fiddlehead season in Canada.

Do you need to review food vocabulary? Go here:

FRUIT
VEGETABLES
FOOD
Some HERBS
DRINKS

Now let's learn some new vocabulary for describing edibles:

Adjectives describing food
Adjectives to describe the taste, condition and other properties of food
Adjectives describing how a food was cooked

By the time we finish this module, you might not find this quiz too difficult.
This adjective - noun matching quiz is hard today, but should get easier by Friday.

Our Gardens

Hello, students of the seniors' class!

Spring is here. Many of us have gardens. Some of us have container gardens on our balconies. Others of us have backyard gardens. I have a narrow vegetable garden in my front yard; I also grow herbs in pots on my deck. Finally, many of us have plots in nearby community gardens. We enjoyed exchanging open pollinated, heirloom seeds this Thursday.  I am excited about that!

We recently learned that the downtown branch of public library has a seed exchange.

Listen and learn these words relating to the garden / yard.

Here is a short listening text about gardening.

Here is another listening text about a garden. How much do you understand?

Do you know the names of all these vegetables?

What about these herbs? I use all these in my cooking. I grow them on my deck.

Here are some more herbs. I use all these in my cooking.

Do you know all these fruits? (Yes, the plural of fruit normally does not take an -S, but in this case I mean varieties of fruit. So it takes an -S ending.)

Here is a video to give you a brief overview of some basic gardening terms.

These are some terms we discussed on Thursday. The last frost date for our area is April 25. We are in hardiness zone 6B. That means THIS WEEKEND is good for starting seeds indoors. Have fun!

Shopping for Food

Hello!

This past week or so we have been learning to ask where to find things in a supermarket. We have also done some comparison shopping using store flyers.

This is a very comprehensive audio / text lesson about grocery shopping.

Here is a good site where you can listen and study new vocabulary.

Watch this video of supermarket dialogues. I am a new fan of EnglishClub.com!

Canadian Superfoods

Hello, students of the seniors' class!

Your presentations on using local foods when they are in season were very interesting! Thank you for following the guidelines. You did a great job of not using notes in front of the class. Your body language was good; you made good eye contact with your audience. I loved the visual aids you created to make your presentations more engaging.

Here is the audio text about cranberries. You can download it, open it in Windows Media Player and listen while you read the transcript that I gave you. There are many other audios and lessons available online HERE. Scroll to the bottom of the page.

This week we also talked about working on the purity of your vowel sounds. You can use Ellis Master Pronunciation software for this purpose. Call me over and I will show you. The desktop icon is purple. If you are at home, you can watch Rachel teach vowels. Here are some of her vowel videos.

Ontario Food

Hello, students of the seniors' class!

You may use your time in the lab to research your presentations.

If you finish that, you may wish to use some of these links:

Do you know your vegetables?

Do you know your fruits? (I used an -S because I mean the many kinds.)

Test yourself on these commonly foraged food.

The website Foodland Ontario may offer you ideas and information. It also has recipes.

Listen to "Good Things Grow in Ontario."

You can use Google and YouTube to find recipes for many foraged foods (Burdock, Red Clover, Dandelion, Black Locust, etc.)

Some Recipes

Hello, students of the seniors' class.

To practice the grammar of causative verbs get, have, and make, SCROLL DOWN.

Here are some recipes for preparing burdock and cattail shoots.



Burdock - pick, wash, prepare, cook. (video)

A Japanese Recipe for Burdock (video)

How to eat the stems and stalks (video)

More Burdock recipes (text)

======GRAMMAR: CAUSATIVE and PASSIVE CAUSATIVE===

Here is a video lesson on causative from an English teacher named Alex.

There are many more. Search on the key words, "English grammar causative" and choose VIDEOS from the Google menu.

This is a good quiz to help you practice causative.

This quiz focuses on passive causative.

Practice using causative in different tenses.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Happy Year of the Wood Goat!

I share your wish for world peace this year.  Thank you for all the treats. That was quite a spread. The red tea was delicious! I loved it when the parade came from childminding, two children of about age three acting as the head and tail of the lion.

Potluck and Pronunciation Lesson

Hello!

There was no blogpost yesterday since it was just another lab day; we followed our routine of choosing among Ellis Master Pronunciation Course, Ellis Intro with Pronunciation Quizzes, or Internet-based pronunciation sites. Many of you have told me that you really like Ellis Intro.

Today we started class by clearing up an earlier confusion. I said I thought there was a caribou on the Canadian quarter, but one student said that in another class, they learned that it was a moose. So I brought in a picture of a moose and a picture of a caribou and let you decide for yourselves. Florin, Bashar and Federico decided it's a caribou. Wikipedia also says it's a caribou. However, many Canadians think there's a moose on their quarter. Maybe you should tell them!

A caribou is an animal like a reindeer that migrates in very large herds--south in fall, north in spring. The caribou are very important to the native peoples who live in their territory. They use every part of the animal from antlers to meat to pelt to hooves. Nothing goes to waste!

I gave you each a scavenger hunt sheet to help you review everything we've covered so far, and we went to the potluck. Unfortunately, there was some confusion around whether our whole class had been invited by Zakieh or only the women. I will do a better job of communicating with Zakieh next time, if there is a next time.

Wen finished the scavenger hunt page. She found a food with an alphabet vowel sound, a food with a relative vowel sound, a food that forms its plural with /s/ and one that forms its plural with /z/. She found a food with linking and one with each kind of consonant sound: voiced and voiceless. Back in the classroom by 12:15, we took up the answers together.

Hopefully Thursday will go more smoothly.

See you then!