Winter Break is Coming

What are we up to lately?

We are keeping busy learning about calcium and vitamin D. We can read nutrition labels.

Wednesdays are our educational technology days. We have iPads and can use Flipgrid for speaking and listening practice and assessment. We are also about to learn to use Google Cardboard since we have six VR viewers.

This is the penultimate week of school before winter break. On the day of the big party, our room will be the quiet games room. We will teach each other some games. Huarong will teach a card trick. Weiying and her friends will teach us to play Mahjong. Nabil, Hamdi, and Raja will teach us to play chess (just the basic moves). Dr. Peng will teach massage. Thanks to Maria, we have a portable massage chair tucked behind our cabinet! I will bring all my games and be ready to teach SET, Quarto, tangrams, and maybe even Mancala.

Did you know that 2018 will be #CCYT, or Canada-China Year of Tourism? I didn't either!

Big Summer Review

Hello, students!

This week we are winding down from a wonderful school term. We are playing games to review prior modules' vocabulary and concepts. We are taking a field trip or two. We might even watch a movie.

Here is the jeopardy game for Thursday. You can play at home with your spouse or by yourself.

Jeopardy - Big Summer Review

Enjoy!

Peace Week

Hello!

Tuesday was our day in the computer lab. Not many people showed up for our conversation class due to the Peace Week activities.

Today we finished our review of the front vowels, syllables and word stress. Then we played a game to review the phonetic symbols.

Monday we will start with a mid-central vowel!

Have a great weekend and remember: Peace - think it, say it, do it!

Three Truths and a Lie

Hello!


I hope all our Muslim colleagues had a wonderful holiday yesterday. Eid Mubarak!


Today was conversation day. We played a game called "Three truths and a lie." I started us off by putting my example on the board:

• I used to have rats for pets.


• I don't have a television.


• My mother is a famous artist.


• I have visited 12 countries.

Three of these are true and one is a lie. Can you guess which is the lie? The idea is to think of true things that seem very unusual. You want to deceive your classmates!

I gave you ten minutes to think up your sentences and write them down. Then we got into groups of three to four students to play the game.

I had fun learning very interesting things about each of you! We learned that Ricardo was a famous dancer when he was a child. We learned that Lena's mother has chickens, goats, ducks and rabbits. We found out that our new colleague Svitlana is a geography teacher. She can help me when I don't know where a country is. People educated in America are not very good at geography, I'm afraid.

Oh, and I also got you all to guess which of my statements was a lie. The lie was about my mother. She is an artist, but not famous. I showed you pictures of my pet rat, Stella. She is dead now, but I loved her a lot when she was alive.

Tomorrow we will continue with the lowest front vowel. See you!

Question Circles

Hello!

Today was another conversation day. Before we started, I put four guidelines on the board:

1. take turns; everyone gets a chance to talk
2. speak English
3. stay on topic

Then we went over them together.

I told you that guideline #1 is very important. I want to see everyone getting a chance to speak. I used my green marker to put a big check mark by guideline #1.

I told you that guideline #2 is pretty important, but I don't mind if you occasionally help each other out using your first language. But let's keep it to 95% English, okay? I put a big green check mark by rule #2.

And then I told you that guideline #3 isn't important to me. You do NOT need to stick to the topics I offer you. I only offer topics to help you get started talking. The whole point of conversation day is to practice speaking. If your group gets excited about another topic, that's great. Run with it. The point is to speak.

Next I showed you a game boards and explained the rules. You told me you prefer to talk in mixed-level groups. We divided into three groups of three and one group of four. Then you all spent the next hour chatting away using the question prompts on the game board.

At 12:27 we had to tidy up and give the classroom back to Chris and his students. Four or five of you came up to tell me that you really enjoyed this activity and want to do it again in the future. I'm really glad I bought that book A Grab Bag of Socializing when I was at the conference in Toronto. I think we're going to have a lot of fun with it on Wednesdays.

See you tomorrow!

Sound Symbols

Hello!

Today was day one of a new pronunciation course. We have two new students, Tauny and Ricardo. Welcome!

Today was all about the phonetic alphabet that we will use in this course. I asked you WHY we need a phonetic sound system in English class. You told me it's because English is so crazy. It's not like Spanish or Arabic or Romanian. You can learn to pronounce Spanish in one day or one week, no problem. Each letter has only one pronunciation. Is English like that? Oh, no, it isn't.

There can be many ways to spell one sound: too, to, two; one, won.

There can be many ways to pronounce one letter. Look at all the sounds that the letter "o" can make in English: to, son, not, most, cost, doctor, woman, women. Yikes!

So we need a reliable system for referring to the sounds of English.

I passed out a sheet with the symbols that we will use in this class. We won't worry about the vowels quite yet. Today we just looked at the symbols for the consonant sounds. Most of them are pretty easy to remember, aren't they? Many of them look just like the English letter: /b, p, g, k, d, t, h, f, v, s, z, m, n, l, r, y, w/.

But some of them are really weird looking symbols! For example: /ŋ/, /ʃ/, /ð/, /θ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. Those are the ones we have to memorize. To help you learn them, I used flash cards and quizzed you individually and as a group. You all did really well with most of them.

For our final activity, we played BINGO! Each card had 25 words on it, most of them food-related. We went over the rules of the game, then passed out beans as markers. I held up a symbol and said, "Find a word that has this sound at the beginning." We had to clarify what "at the beginning" means.

Everyone did really well. I saw some people helping the newer students. I appreciate that! We had four people BINGO at the same time. I had some little prizes for the winners.

Every day we will continue to drill the consonant symbols for a few minutes at the beginning or at the end of class. Pretty soon we will know them by heart.

See you tomorrow. There is NOT a computer lab day this week.

Survey Results

Thank you to everyone who participated in our pronunciation class survey. The results of our survey are here.

We will try to have a conversation day almost every Wednesday. Let's try that for a while and see how we feel in a few weeks, okay?

Also, I will try to have more games. About 80% of you said you like games at least twice a week.

Keep giving me ideas! I love it when we work as a team to build the best class EVER!