We Continue to Have a Good Time With our Students!

Team Journal for Friday November 20, 2015

Message of the day:

The desire to succeed means nothing without the will to prepare – Author unknown

Karen helps the students with pronunciations

We continue to have a good time with our teachers.  Today, my class reviewed some menus from Denny’s.  I had not really thought about it, but, for a Chinese person, the menu is quite difficult to read and understand.  There are many words and phrases that a foreign person wouldn’t necessarily know without living in the USA.  For example, the menu had “Buffalo Chicken Wings” and the ladies were confused and wondered 1) if the wings were chicken or buffalo (and what was a buffalo) and 2) if they were really chicken wings, why did they call them buffalo wings.  This was hard to explain. Another unforeseen complication with the menu was that words like “hashed browns” or “mashed potatoes” or “fajitas” were not defined.  There were other foods that the class was not familiar with (like avocado slices or zucchini) that required a dictionary. In the end, it was an interesting exercise for both myself and the class.

We followed up with some tongue twisters (as they had indicated that they liked those very much) to work on their pronunciations.  Of course, the statements are a little nonsensical but as expected, their tongues were twisted.  We also did a little writing on silly topics where the teachers were provided a subject to write about. One example was that they had to write a story about an elephant that could fly.

Shek works with his class on a matching game

In the afternoon, we traded classes and I had an opportunity to work with both Shek’s and Rich’s classes.  It was a pleasurable experience because I had talked with many of them, but, I did not know their names.  By the end of the day, I had tried to memorize their English names and I think I succeeded, but, only tomorrow will I know for sure.

In the afternoon session, we played synonym and antonym bingo in my room.  In Rich’s room, he introduced the teachers to the card game called “Crazy Eights.”  Shek worked with the groups to translate a newspaper article.  All classes went well and it was a nice afternoon change.

While the teachers were in my class, I continued to ask about the most favorite and the least favorite activities and as expected, there were many different answers.  Some people really enjoyed the games while others enjoyed learning a little more about the US.  In the end, the most popular activities in the afternoons when we combined three teachers and 30 students.  We played games and the sessions were more spirited.  The category game was very popular and so was Simon Says.

Tomorrow we will say goodbye to these teachers.  I will actually miss working with them and I wish I had more time with them.

Submitted by Karen