These past few weeks the students have been more busy and stressed than usual as some of their classes are ending and exams are starting. I have tried to make classes useful but also unusual and fun to raise interest and lower the stress level. Last week we talked about slang, cliches, idioms and cyberspeak. The students had fun with the different activities. They identified English cliches in a funny paragraph and then re-wrote some cliches that they use a lot in their writing (i.e. "no pain, no gain", "time flies"). The results were pretty funny and included some like "time is like toilet paper, it always runs out" and "no fishing, no fish". To practice some slang I gave a word, its definition and an example sentence to two students and they had to make a brief dialogue to the class that demonstrated the meaning. The class then had to guess the meaning and usage of the word. We did some examples like "what's the damage?", "veg out" and "hangover". Sometimes the conversations worked and other times they were just plain hilarious.
When I went over some English "shortcuts" for chatting online or sending text messages the students got really excited and quickly caught on as they do the same thing in Chinese. When they text "886" the numbers sound like "bye-bye" and when they text "3Q" it sounds like "thank you". We went over the basics (i.e. 2=to, too, 4=for, c=see etc.) and then I let them tackle some sample messages and they got a chance to write their own for their partner to decipher (btw, can you do it? "sup qt, sry i made u w8 4 me last nite, i 4got. Let's talk f2f asap. lol - sarah). To practice idioms they divided into groups and talked about several of the more famous ones to see if they could figure out what they meant. Overall, the lesson was really fun and I think the students enjoyed doing something a little different.
This week my lesson was on nature and ways to take better care of the environment. The class ranged from the standard/boring discussions on current environmental problems and brainstorming possible solutions to playing games like "where am I?" (describing natural areas like volcanoes, waterfalls, caves etc.), drawing maps of islands and then describing them for their partner to draw, animal charades and a completely ridiculous (but hilarious) game of "find the other person in the class to match the correct animal with the sound it makes". They loved charades and were literally practicing their animal moves during the break. It was a zoo. Matching animals with their sounds turned into a veritable barnyard ruckus with hee-haws, cock-a-doodle-doos, moos, neighs and baas coming from all corners of the room. Teaching. English. In. China. Is. Awesome.
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