Art and Music!

The theme of our sixth and last week of camp is art and music! This week in ESL, my class will be writing autobiographies based on Linda Rief's "Rambling Autobiography" (check out their blogs for these). They'll also choose a line from the Rambling Autobiography and expand upon it on their blog. Then they will be writing a brief biography of a favorite artist or musician. In Content, we'll be learning art and music vocabulary and writing poems based on Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." I'm so excited that they actually get to visit the Frost Museum as one of their afternoon activities! In Project class, they'll be making music videos for their favorite songs.

Practice Makes Perfect!

Our theme this week is sports and recreation. In our small class, there's quite a range of favorite sports--Hiro likes tennis, Julia and Veronika both enjoy horseback riding, and Li prefers badminton!  In ESL class, we'll be learning about why fitness is important to health and writing persuasive essays on a topic related to sports. In content class, we'll create new sports and try to explain our favorite sports to people who have never heard of them before. For project class, students will make presentations about famous athletes. Like last week's skits, their presentations this week need to be script free--they need to have all the words memorized. Check out my students' blogs for their reactions to the Fisher Cats baseball game they went to on Sunday! Stay tuned for more sports related postings later in the week.

The Joy of Cooking!

This week's theme is culinary arts! Outside the classroom, my students (75% of whom are sitting in the same chair in the photo above) have been learning to chop vegetables and make banana cupcakes. Their creations have been served for dinner in the dining hall! When not eating on campus, they've been eating at classic American diners, Japanese restaurants, and Faneuil Hall. Inside the classroom, they've been reading and writing restaurant reviews, learning to discuss topics such as atmosphere, service, and decor. They've also been writing persuasive essays on topics such as junk food and anorexia, honing their ability to provide reasons and supportive details for a thesis. They tested their reading skills on a New York Times restaurant review and demonstrated impressive reading comprehension. Check out their blogs for mouth-watering descriptions of their favorite foods, as well as their reviews of the New Hampton cafeteria!

Brainstorm from class today

Use this information to help your write your homework assignment!

Dining at the Caf

-background: buffet style

                        location: in New Hampton School

                        breakfast: 7:00 to 9:00

                        lunch: 12:00 to 1:00

                        dinner: 5:00 to 6:00

                        cost: free for students and faculty

                        website: www.newhampton.org, phone: none

                        reservations: none

                        special events: barbecues, brunch, cooking classes

                        wine: no

-service:          cooks but no waiters, but customers are polite

                        customers have to bus their own tables

-atmosphere: clean, warm, good views, plenty of light, noisy when there are sports camps, otherwise quiet

-décor: paintings on the walls, flags from different countries, large windows, wooden chairs and tables, 8 seats per table but customers can add chairs, large and small dining room

-bad sweet and sour tofu, bad ice cream (??), many things to eat, always different dishes every day, fresh fruit, many vegetarian and vegan and gluten free options (no wheat flour)

                       

Science and Technology!

The theme of this week is science and technology. Our class has been focusing on climate change, green technology, and renewable energy. So far this week we've reflected on our use of technology in daily life, read an article about rising CO2 levels, reported on current events related to climate change, and written a persuasive essay on a topic related to technology use. Check my students' blogs tonight for the final drafts of their essays. They've been through at least four or five drafts and look pretty polished.

We've also spent some time reading science fiction stories. We read Ray Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian" and talked about Bradbury's vision of 2053 written in 1950. We'll also be reading Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" about the aftermath of nuclear war. The students read Sara Teasdale's poem of the same title in preparation for reading the story. Check out Andreana's thoughtful response to the poem:

"In my opinion this is a very sad poem, but there are some sentences that I like very much like the first one: "There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground". This poem talks about the life on the Earth without humans; I think that this will be better for the nature and for animals because there will be less pollution and so animals can smell better the ground and the fresh air. Another sentence that struck me very much is: "And not one will know of the world". I think that this sentence has many different meaning. Is both sad and full of happiness because there won't be no more wars, but is sad because there won't be humans and so we will disappear. 
This poem makes me feel weird because for me is a sad story, but sometimes there are sentences that said wonderful things. So I think that is a very strange poem, but represents also the persons who wrote it."

Presentations!

Today the students presented their outdoor adventure projects. I was so proud of my group! They worked incredibly hard on their videos (although there were some technical difficulties). They created advertisements for various outdoor adventures ranging from fishing to skydiving. I'm not sure which was funnier, Filippo pretending to slalom down a grassy hill or Greta hunting a stuffed animal with a water gun!

Link for adventure story summary activity

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/The-Top-10-Adventure-Stories-of-2012.html

Outdoor Adventure!

The theme of this week is Outdoor Adventure, and so we began class today by sharing some of the outdoor adventures we've had in our lives. I talked about my trek across a glacier to the Monte Rosa Hutte (pictured below). Filippo talked about hiking up a mountain at night, carrying his skis, in order to dine at a restaurant at the peak and then ski back down to his house (!!). Andreana described a heartstopping experience on a safari in Africa where her car was encircled by seven lions! Check  their blogs later in the week for accounts of the outdoor adventures they experience here in New Hampshire. I can't wait to hear about their camping trip this weekend!

Horror stories!

Last week's "Carnival" theme culminated in writing stories about scary stories. Head on over to my students' blogs (follow the links below) to check them out! Beware, some of the students decided that "scary" meant "gory".

Delving into the Carnival theme!

Today's classes were rewarding as we dug deeper into personal writing as well as the carnival theme. In the ESL class, we focused on how good storytelling answers the "who, what, when, where, why" questions. The students paired up to tell each other funny, scary, or exciting stories that will appear on their personal blogs tonight! Coco shared her experience driving a motorboat and George described (apparently without remorse!) an instance when he and his brother threw dirty snowballs at their teacher, who was wearing a white coat.

In the content class, we brainstormed about how carnivals appeal to all five sentences and practiced speaking at length about photographs of carnivals. We then talked about the qualities of good descriptive writing. The students read and analyzed the description of Bilbo's hobbit hole from Tolkien's The Hobbit. Tomorrow they will write their own descriptions of carnivals, referring back to the sensory language we talked about today.

First Day of Class!

Hello and welcome to Meg's AELP class blog! For the next six weeks, we will be studying English through three different types of class: ESL, content, and project. Our project this week is to create a carnival for the young children living on our campus. Please check back frequently for updates on how our classes are going!