Some Little Thoughts.

Well, today started off as a pretty sunny day (by Miranda standards), but it's now 3:30pm and it's right back to being cloudy.

I just finished the last book in the Millennium Trilogy, "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" and it was great. I'm honestly a little sad that there aren't any more to read now!

Since I have work at the academia in a half hour, I decided that I should really prepare something. Yesterday while I was in the same situation, I was looking through a book I borrowed from the school called "Grammar Games" (since I'm really a kid at heart, I teach the same way, by playing!) I found a great activity that I tried out with two of my teenage girl students, and it worked great. It's called "Sentence Reduction/Disappearing Sentences" It works like this: 

You write a big sentence up on the board, for example:

Jane went out early and walked sleepily down the street to buy some milk and bread when she saw her old friend driving very fast in a beautiful new red car; she waved quickly just before the car disappeared around the sharp corner. 

What the students' goal is, is to reduce the sentence (keep making it shorter and shorter) by eliminating up to three words at a time, while still keeping the sentence grammatically correct. For example, eliminating "and bread" makes the sentence shorter, but still correct. They have to keep doing that all the way until there is only 1 word, or no words left in the sentence. 

I just realized, while I was looking online for some example sentences to use, that I love this stuff. I could really spend hours looking up fun grammar activities. 

I enjoy challenging my students, and pushing them out of their comfort zones. Here in Spain, students have a tendency to never want to try to speak, or answer questions in English unless they are completely sure of themselves (when they speak in Spanish it's a WHOLE different story) but I have figured out that when it comes to competition/challenge they really can't resist. 

Anyways, sometimes I still can't believe that this is my job, just speaking my own language that is. I guess sometimes it just seems so simple.