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!

Please Excuse the Interruption, But Here Comes Homework!!

Unfortunately, we had two students absent from class today (we missed you, Jimena & Greta!), so we had to rearrange our class activities a bit this morning. Good thing we're all very flexible! Tonight, we'll have two completely separate sets of homework--one for the students who were in class, and one for the students who weren't. Our grammar focus was on expressing future in the past, and because it's was only introduced today, I don't think it's fair to ask our absentee students to complete an assignment based on it. Check out your homework below.

Adam, Minori, Ellie:

1) Watch this similes vs. metaphors video (just click the link) and follow the narrating teacher's directions. If you can get through the entire 8 minutes, that's great. If not, please complete just the first half.

2) Write a 1-3 paragraph blog post about something you were going to do in the past, but didn't. Use "would~" or "was/were going to~" in your writing.

3) Finish your carnival toy avatars!

Jimena & Greta

1) Finish typing the second draft of your personal narrative.

2) If you haven't already, please write your blog post about the "Do you remember? I do." prompt.

3) Finish your carnival toy avatars!

4) If you have already completed the rest of your homework, please watch the first half (4 minutes) of this similes vs. metaphors video, like the rest of the class.

Good luck!

Student Showcase

I would like to start this post by saying a huge THANK YOU to the members of my class so far this summer. Adam, Jimena, Ellie, Minori & Greta: I think that you are not only amazing students, but also extraordinary people. In the past week and a half, I have already seen great efforts from you, to communicate your ideas in a meaningful & clear way, to think deeply & examine topics from different perspectives, and to take risks. I appreciate all of your hard work, as well as the energy & humor that you bring to class on a daily basis. You are all wonderfully talented individuals. On that note, I'd really like to begin sharing pieces of your hard work with the rest of the blogosphere. This way, people besides me (other teachers or members of the NHS community or your parents & friends) can begin to appreciate the beauty of your writing the same way that I do.

To blog readers from outside of our classroom, let me set up the background that you need in order to contextualize Greta's writing. Students in my class were given a poem by Linda Rief, author of a book entitled 100 Quickwrites. (Please keep in mind that the link I've attached here is simply a sample, not the full text.) The poem is called "A Day in July," and students had to read it, make notes and decode new phrases or unfamiliar words. Then, we had a group discussion of their interpretations of the piece. "A Day" is full of symbolism & figurative language, such as nature-based similes, and fit in perfectly with our outdoor theme this week. For homework, I asked each student to take the opening two lines from Rief's poem ("Do you remember? I do.") and write a blog post about what these words bring to mind for them. Greta chose to write her own passage following Rief's style, writing with a particular audience (perhaps her family?) in mind. Don't forget that this is her original work--I didn't change a thing! Please feel free to comment after you read it.

Do You Remember? I Do.

by Greta

Do you remember? I do.  It was the hottest summer ever. We were in the south of France, the best place  for our vacations. We used to spend our days outside to enjoy that wonderful location, I loved that happy atmosphere made by the crowd, the smell of the sea and the sound of the street markets. But when the sun was about to go down, everything used to change. We went to the beach and everything looked incredibly different. Groups of young people, friends I guess, were everywhere sitting or lying on the little rocks the beach was made from, they were watching the sunset. Some of them whispered but most of them were quiet. They were all enjoying that memorable moment in silence while the last sunshine made the sea surface sparkle. Do you remember?

The Great (Occasionally Terrifying) Outdoors

Can I please tell you how excited I am about our AELP Adventure theme this week??? I love almost anything outdoors, and who could possibly turn down the chance to go on an adventure? Now, I say almost because there are a few things about wilderness that I'm not super excited about, namely bugs & spiders. Pretty much anything with more than four legs! It's funny how being afraid of things can make us feel (and act) like children again. This was one of my little brother's favorite toys when he was younger, but I definitely wasn't a big fan...and it still kind of gives me the creeps.

All that aside, we have a bunch of terrific outdoor adventures planned for our AELPers this week, so just you wait! I, personally, had one of my own over the weekend. We try to take our dogs for a hike or long trail walk at least once a week in order to get out all of their extra energy--you dog owners know what I'm talking about, right? Well, we were out on the trails, almost finished with our walk, when one of our dogs discovered a porcupine. Of course, if ONE dog gets involved, then ALL of them have to, so before we knew it we had four dogs full of porcupine quills!! It was totally terrifying. In the end, I guess the good thing was that we found we react to panicking situations. It's unbelievably challenging to keep your cool when you're put into that kind of position. To me, that's the main message to take away from my experience. Even though it definitely wasn't the most positive outdoor experience we've ever had, at least we've learned something important about ourselves...and maybe we'll do something different next time.

Here's wishing everyone in our AELP family a fun, safe, porcupine-free outdoor adventure week!

Creepy, crawly, spooky, freaky...carnival?!

Today in class, we explored the connection between thrilling carnival (or amusement park) rides and the chilling literature & films of the horror genre. What's the appeal of terror? Where does the fascination with all things grotesque come from? We considered the origins of carnivals and discussed the dark history of "freak" shows in ancient Europe & the US, which offered us some explanation. 

I, for one, can't stand anything scary. No horror movies for me, thanks! In my opinion, we're fearful of certain things for good reason--because they're dangerous. However, some studies suggest that, in moderation, fright is good for us. Do you agree?

Getting to Know You...

"...getting to know all about you. Getting to like you, getting to hope you like me." Does anyone recognize these lyrics? They're from the movie "The King and I," which was one of my favorites when I was a kid. It's a little old fashioned, but a classic. In the movie, Anna is a school teacher who has just met her new students for the first time. I can't help but think of this song on our first day of class! I know it's typical for students to be a little apprehensive, but did you know that we teachers get nervous, too?! We receive your application and grade your entrance exams, but it's impossible to get to know someone completely on paper. Our first time meeting as a class is an important bonding experience, which is why one of my class themes this week will be community building. Now is the time for us to get to know each other in a safe environment where you & your ideas are respected and you are free to make mistakes & learn. I left class today feeling positive and excited for what tomorrow will bring.

I'll end my post with another quote from the same movie. "It's a very ancient saying, but a true and honest thought, that if you become a teacher, by your pupils you'll be taught." I hope to learn as much from all of you as you do from me. Welcome Ellie, Adam, Greta, Jimena & Minori! Let the fun begin!!