The first week back

This term I am placing emphasis on vocabulary. I have given all of the students the 1000 most common words in English. They had the task of highlighting any words that they didn't know well and then they wrote it in a sentence. This week we concentrated on only the first 500 words (the first sheet). We also played some vocabularly games. Next week I plan to focus on the second sheet and get the students to recognise how the words are formed and how they can be changed into verbs, adjectives, nouns, etc. I would like the students to be competent at using these words because we will then start to focus on the TOEIC vocabulary as well as some other academic vocabulary.

Fourteen students from the University of Otago TESOL class came last Tuesday to meet the CEE students over morning tea. On Wednesday the TESOL class sat and watched while two teachers each taught for about 40 minutes to the CEE students. The first student was from Palestine and taught about his culture. The second student taught about the weather. This class will continue every Wednesday from 10-12 for the term. It is a good way for the students to interact with people of their own age - with a purpose.

I have finally got a Smartboard in my classroom. A Smartboard is an interactive whiteboard. It means that I can touch the screen and do all sorts of wonderful things - changing sentences around, produce pronunciation activities, etc. It is a valuable tool to have in the classroom and hopefully the students can also see the benefit of its use.

Jaffa Race

Hi everyone,

Here is a link to the Jaffa Race on the 17th of July. Please come along!!

http://www.parentscentre.org.nz/taieri/JaffaRace.asp

olive harvest - 1 degree all day at Tarras

Hoar Frost at - 4 degrees midday in Alexandra.