Saturday, 30 October, 2010: A1 Class

This was the class in which we were all supposed to bring in special photos and share a story about them.  Only half the class brought in pictures, but that's okay, because I made the rest of the students tell a story or answer an open-ended question about themselves, so we all had a chance to speak.  Some vocabulary that came up in this class was:

Octoberfest --> a German holiday that involves drinking a lot of beer.
spelling bee --> a spelling competition
spelling celebration --> a Mongolian celebration when a child learns his or her ABCs
about/around --> we can say "about" or "around" to talk about approximate age, eg. I was about two in this picture.  We stop receiving gifts for children's day when we are around eighteen.
teenager --> someone who is between thirteen and nineteen years old
trend --> something that happens alot; something that is cool to do
vacation --> a holiday
sausages --> meat which is linked together in casings, like this:

I also found this picture when I googled "sausages", and it's so strange, I think I'll share it here, too:

I also promised Zugi that I would post some popular economics books which I enjoy.  Here they are:
The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford)
Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner)
Superfreakonomics (Levitt and Dubner)
The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
The Armchair Economist (Steven E. Landsburg)
Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely)
 
At the end of the class, we had a few minutes left, so I taught the students how to play MASH, which is a game I used to play with my friends when I was young. Some vocabulary words that came up when I was explaining the game of MASH were:

mansion --> a really big, fancy house where very rich people live
shack  -> a really small, run-down house where very poor people live
UFO --> the spaceship that an alien drives (Unidentified Flying Object)
unidentified --> This is an amalgamation of words:
unIDENTIFied --> to "identify" something means to figure out what it is.
unIDENTIFIED --> if something is identified, you already know what it is.
UNIDENTIFIED --> something which you do not know what it is.

We played MASH to figure out what kind of house we'll live in, what job you'll have, what car you'll drive, and how many children you will have, but the traditional way to play MASH is to find out who you will marry when you grow up.