Learn to have a little class, Class!

So this week is all about art & music, right? Well, art & music makes me think about culture and culture makes me think about people's upbringings, and people's upbringings make me think about manners. Whew! Did you follow my train of thought there?? My brain works in wacky ways. What better time to blog about manners, though, after the class discussion we had this morning! Unfortunately, I can't take credit for this writing prompt--I borrowed it from a book called Yoga for the Brain, by Dawn DiPrince & Cheryl Miller Thurston. Read on to find out what I'd like you to blog about tonight! Just so you know, "etiquette" is just another word for "manners."

Emily Post's 1922 book, Etiquette, was quite popular in its day, selling over a million copies. Here are some examples of its advice:

• There is no rudeness greater than for a gentleman to stand talking to a lady with his hat on.
• Whether in a private carriage, a car or a taxi, a lady must never sit on a gentleman's left, because a lady "on the left" is not a "lady."

Clearly, times have changed! What is one area of modern life that you think could use some clear and specific rules of etiquette? Would it involve cell phones? Using skateboards? Answering email? Working out at the gym? Sharing a room in your dorm? Dealing with noisy children in restaurants? Or...?

Write the etiquette rules for one specific area of modern day life.

Bon Appetit!

Last week, we dove head first into the terrifically tempting and tasty world of culinary arts! Scrumptious snacks, healthy habits...our class discussions got our mouths watering and our stomachs rumbling. Students in my class compared the older food pyramid model to the new USDA Choose My Plate guidelines. They examined the six food groups and explored how a specialty diet would impact their daily food choices by creating their own meal plans to follow certain limitations.

Ellie & Filippo pose in front of their vegan meal plan. Even though Filippo's grandmother follows a mostly vegan diet, these two found it challenging to think of animal product-free meals that they might normally eat...

Here, Jimena & Luc explain their gluten free meal plan. The girls thought it was relatively easy to come up with their meals, and used real GF restaurant menus as their source of inspiration. Of course, following the plan would be an entirely different matter...

Finally, as part of their blogging homework, I asked students to write a love letter to the chef of their dreams, imagining the whole time that they were total foodies. You'll understand more about this after you read Fernando's hilarious post:


Dear Master Chef:

First, I want you to know that I am a foodie. This is a person who is totally obsessed with food. Everyday, I think of food, and every night, I dream of food. Actually, sometimes I think that my brain is made of food.

I am writing this because I am in love with your Japanese food, and I can´t stop eating it until I have no more money to pay for it.
The rice is like a delicious piece of heaven that makes dipping it in soya sauce a sin. The fish cut is as perfect as a good drink of sake after finishing the food. Sometimes it is sad to eat it because the culinary arts are perfectly appreciated in the view of it, and also it is difficult to swallow and stop feeling that lovely flavor on tongue.

One day, I would like to watch you preparing this magic food and managing the kitchen. I will book all the restaurant, and eat sushi until exploit, make you rich, and bring all my friends to this oriental paradise.

I am so obsessed with food that when I was a child I always took food on the sly, because my mother had forbidden me from eating a lot when she found out of my obsession with food.
Nevertheless, now I can do whatever I want, and spend my money however I want. So, when I go to your restaurant, I want you to take me into it, and don´t let me forget that moment when I finally do what I have been waiting to do for years: get drunk on your Japanese food.

A Dose of Grammatical Nyquil

Articles in English are one of those frustrating tiny little parts of speech that can give even the most advanced students an immeasurable amount of trouble. If stress about article use is keeping you up at night, have no fear! The following videos, although perhaps a little bit dry, clear up a lot of common article confusions with precise examples and easy-to-follow rules. The teacher who narrates each clip, Jennifer, makes her videos as interactive as possible by even providing short independent practice activities followed by their answers. If you don't have time to watch each clip all the way through, feel free to skip around. Her powerpoint slides in between each talking section give you most of the information that you need, making article mistakes a thing of the past. I bet you'll be sleeping like a baby tonight!

Lesson 22, Part 1 (We explored bits of this video in class.)

Lesson 22, Part 2: Articles Review & Practice

Lesson 23: Generic Nouns

Lesson 24, Part 1: Places & Geographical Names

Lesson 24, Part 2: Guidelines Review & Practice

Life is a Metaphor

This week, in an attempt to add a bit of creative flare to our conversations and writing assignments, we've been exploring the colorful world of metaphors. We know that metaphors can make our writing more interesting, help us build up a stronger vocabulary base and keep our brains alive through the higher order thinking required by these comparisons. Please take a look at our own, 100% original metaphors below and feel free to comment!

Luc & Jimena collaborated on the following:

Filippo shared this snippet with us:

Here's Fernando's contribution:

And last, but certainly not least, is Ellie's whimsical idea:

Some of them are more direct, while others make you think a bit. Do you agree or disagree with any of these metaphors? What kinds of pictures popped into your head as you read through each one?

Student Showcase, Part 2

It's time again to highlight some of the fantastic writing of students in my class. This piece is one of Ellie's homework blog posts. The assignment was to use descriptive phrases & figurative language to describe your favorite season in your home country. Ellie does a beautiful job employing personification to help her paint a picture of the positive and negative characteristics of autumn, just as if the season were a real friend! Please remember that this is her original, completely unedited work. Enjoy!

Miss Fall Story

by Ellie

I want to tell you about my best friend Miss Fall.

She comes to visit me  every year and she stays for 3 months. I`m looking forward to it, and like a child check my calendar every day, hopefully, she will arrive soon.

She`s a very beautiful middle-aged lady, she`s very elegant and also all her movements are graceful and effortless. Moreover the woman has a good education and it`s interesting to talk to her

There is one curious fact about her she`s very moody. Sometimes she is so delighted, her eyes shine  like sun in the blue sky, her fabulous clothes are very colorful: red, green, red, orange, brown, yellow. Her smile is glaring. Some days she looks dreary and depressed. She can sit in the garden and cry during the  whole day without any pause. 

Children don`t really like her, they love our neighbor Miss Summer, who cooks for them fresh fruits and ice cream and kids enjoy playing in a green field near her pretty house. 

However, I`m opposite and we spend wonderful time with miss Fall: we drink hot chocolate, while we sit in the cozy sofas and watch the fire. We talk a lot and I often call my friends to come to join us.

When the time comes, miss Fall leaves, but I am sure, she`ll come next time!

(Harder), Better, (Faster), STRONGER

Thanks for the title, Kanye. Now let's take these lyrics and apply them to our language learning. The students in my class are incredibly secure in their foundational knowledge of English. To me, the next step is transforming your expressions into sophisticated, well-developed articulations that offer better, stronger meaning. As part of our "Outdoor Adventure" unit, we're exploring figurative language and powerful descriptive phrases. We watched this teacher's minilesson and challenged ourselves to identify similes & metaphors in pop songs that we all (well, maybe not all...) know & love.

Today, we explored the rich, deliciously descriptive world of synonyms. We started with simple words of  emotion, such as "happy," "sad," "angry," and "fear," because these feelings are universally experienced. Students were then each asked to create a "shades of description" strip where they used powerful synonyms to illustrate a full spectrum of meaning. The lighter colors represented less potent word choices; as the color on the paint sample strip became deeper or more vivid, so too did the vocabulary associated with it. Check out our work:

Shades of Description

For homework, my students will take this activity to a higher level, writing about emotion-based or weather-related topics (both themes are major components of the short fictional story we're reading this week, entitled "A Blizzard under a Blue Sky" by Pam Houston) using powerful descriptive phrases. I can't wait to see what these gifted linguists/writers/comedians produce!

"A" Little Review Never Hurt Anybody

Yesterday, Ellie approached me and said, "Kate, it seems like all of us are having trouble using articles in our writing. Could we have a lesson based on this?" Let me just say that it's a teacher's dream come true to have a student who comes right out and tells you what she needs! I think that Ellie was absolutely right. I know that the members of my class have spent plenty of time studying articles in the past, but it's one of those grammar points that is particularly hard to master, especially if your native language has a completely different structure. Today, we warmed up with a peer editing exercise where I posted actual mistakes from previous assignments and asked my students to make the appropriate corrections. That activity turned out to be not so challenging, but then we took a pretest to get a better feel for our understanding of how to use articles in more complex writing. After the pretest, we watched a few select segments from this video (some of it is a bit too introductory) & had a class discussion where students thought more deeply about specific instances where articles are or are not necessary. Check out the links if you want to brush up on your skills!