I hope you find the third issue of this newsletter useful

Well, sadly the majority of my students are not receiving this e-zine. I tried to email them about this fact, using the email addresses they put on the list during our Social Club and private classes, but even my emails don't get through, which probably means that those emails are either wrong by now, or their in-boxes are full, so they can't receive emails, let alone e-zines.

I shall only say that people can subscribe individually through the form on http://www.my-english-club.com/ - if anybody mentions to you that they are interested in receiving it, please tell them this - many thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on http://www.my-english-club.com/English_Corner_Ezine-backissues.html

That is that; now let’s recap what we did last week during our English Corner classes.

Wednesday 05/21 - Travelling Gadgets

I was asked what's a 'gadget' on this occasion. The definition we found in the dictionary is 'an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use but often thought of as a novelty'. I call a gadget 'a product that makes our lives more comfortable'. We usually use gadgets in the kitchen and in the office, but life is full of them, indeed.

We looked at the Pinterest website, as a good way of classifying information by making a collage of pictures taken either from the same website, or from the entire web. You would need to subscribe, in order for you to be able to build your own boards of favourites, but subscription is free and Pinterest is accessible in China.

I would also recommend this website for a novel way of organising new words in your vocabulary lists. It's time-consuming, I know, but you would build a great platform for your very own pictionary.

To exemplify, I created my own board for this class - you can find it on: http://www.pinterest.com/luciadavinci/travelling-gadgets/

Feel free to surf around Pinterest afterwards, in search of your own interests.

Thursday 05/22 - Mobile Phones and Us

We used Pinterest again, for this class, which was a great idea, as the most popular aspect of this topic was related to how a good-looking mobile phone can influence our image and self-perception. Have a look for yourselves:

http://www.pinterest.com/luciadavinci/mobile-phones-and-us/

http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/11/17/i-can-see-through-your-juice/

Saturday 05/24 - More Word Games

Then we played 'Make a story word-by-word', when each team member had to add a word in order to build a complete sentence. We ended up with some really long sentences in some cases...

Another game we played was 'Hot Seat', where each team would send a representative to sit on a chair by the whiteboard, with their back to the board and another member from the opposing team would write a selected word on the board. Then the first team had to try to help the student in the hot seat to guess the word, by describing it to the best of their abilities.

Great fun we had again! At the end of the class I checked with all the students present as to which game was the favourite and it was confirmed that the last one was the best.

I realised that you prefer the easy games - the ones based on words, rather than on whole expressions and sentences. Still, I think that we should progress to higher level games, maybe pre-intermediary, if not intermediary - the beginner level, however simple and funny it may be, it doesn't help you progress much. Well, this is only my opinion, but it's not always the case that games are used for learning, which is what I intended for our Social Clubs.

This is it, folks!

Have a good week ahead, everybody!

Lucia da Vinci