A busy weekend!

The rest of the week went fine, with no real surprised. This week in my classes we were working on tenses, as I realized that my students are having a very hard time with that. So, first we did a discussion on different tenses (with candy, of course!). Then, they did a quick writing activity that I will use for a game for next week. They made columns on their sheet of paper with the headings, "Time", "Verb", "Now", "Yesterday" and "Tomorrow". They then had to go through and list the things that they do on an average day. So, they might put:
Time: 8 am
Verb: wake up
Now: I am waking up
Tomorrow: I will wake up
Yesterday: I woke up

Then they did this for all the things that they do during the day on an average day. Doing this I was able to see the difficulity that many of my students have with tenses. So, next week we are going to have some games and activities to work on this. Then, we did vocabulary. Each week, I give the students 10 new vocabulary words that are words that very well could appear on their large departmental English tests. It takes about 10-15 minutes to go over these new words. Then, sometimes we move on to other activities and sometimes they do activities involving the vocabulary words. This week, I divided the class into 10 different groups and they each had to make skits to peform in the class. Each group was assigned one vocabulary word and they had to use it correctly. Also, each member of the group (each group had 3-4 members in it) had to speak at least once. The students really like creating things and acting stuff out infront of the class. I have some very creative students.

This weekend, so far, has been a lot of fun. Friday, yesterday, we went to Serena's house for dinner. Her parents made a chicken dish, beef stew dish, dumplings and a few other dishes for us. This was the first home cooked meal that we have had in China. It was amazing. At their home was Serena, her parents, her uncle and neice, who is 12 and nows a little bit of English. Serena taught her parents a little bit of English before we came over. They were able to say, "please have a seat", "Do you like dumplings?" and "Welcome to our home". Her dad is an amazing cook. It was a great dinner. I know it sounds horrible, but after dinner, Serena turned on the tv and we were so excited that they put on the English channel. We watched it for about half an hour. We have tvs in our apartments, but we don't get any tv channels. We just use our TVs to hook up the dvd player to watch movies. So, this was the first time, really, with the exception for when we were in the Shiz and Beijing that we had been around a tv in 10 weeks! After dinner, we headed home and called it a night. We were at their house for over 3 hours!

Tonight was Lotus's birthday, so we went to the KTV. It was Meghan, Chris, Megan, Travis, Matt, Jimmy, Lotus, Lotus's three roommates and me. It was a great time. We met at around 6 at the KTV and stayed for about four hours. It was a pretty relaxed time, but it's nice to have a weekend that is relaxing every once in a while. So, around 10 we called it a night and now I am back here.

Tomorrow morning Serena is going to meet me and come with me to the train station. She is going to help buy our tickets to go to Beijing via the train. We are taking the Thursday morning (630 am train) to Beijing, which takes about 3.5 hours. We will be in Beijing through Sunday, then will take the early morning train back on Monday so we are back in time to teach Monday afternoon.

After that, some of my students/friends are coming over to teach me and Meghan how to make dumplings. So, it is going to be Max, Michael, Vince, Ted, Winter, Arwen and CiCi. They are going to arrive around 4 and then we are going to make dumplings and maybe watch an American movie. Hopefully I will be a good dumpling maker, so I can cook some dumplings for you all when I get back to the States. Luckily, for you all, once they teach me, I do have many months to perfect my dumpling making skills before I have the opportunity to cook for you!

Hope all is well and that it isn't too cold where you are yet!! It is starting to get cold here, but it's only going to get colder. At least it doesn't snow nearly as much here as it does back home in Des Moines.