Hunting Trip

The weather is changing in my home town, and winter will be there soon. Fall is a beautiful time of year, and people try to spend as much time outside as they can, before winter arrives and everything freezes. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my dad and my brothers love fishing and hunting. Every fall my brothers visit my parents, and my dad and my brothers spend a lot of time hunting. They usually hunt for ducks near our home, but they often travel to other places, and sometimes they go to Canada. I love duck. I think that it is really delicious. Have you ever had it?

In this picture you can see my two brothers and my dad. This picture was taken last week - at the end of a 4 day hunting trip. On the trip they got 40 ducks and 1 goose. They did most of their shooting from the boat, which you can see is painted camouphlage so the ducks don't see them so easily. You can also see the duck "decoys" in the boat - they are plastic ducks that they put in the water to attract real ducks.

A new academic year

It is week 3 already, and my sections are already busy studying their grammar and writing and reading. I have about 40 students this semester, so the classes are full of activity. I think I know everybody's name, but I will get to know them better and better as the semester goes on. I already know that I've got some really hard working students, so that makes me really optimistic about the year ahead. I am sure that it will be an interesting experience for everyone, and I hope that all my students learn a lot, improve their English, and enjoy the learning process.

One of our first class activities was to try to build a building using spaghetti and marshmallows. I was really impressed with the structures that some students created. There was a lot of imagination in the classroom that day. We saw how, like English, it is important for a building to have a strong foundation. We discussed how this year we will continue to build a strong foundation for their English language abilities. We had a lot of fun!

Welcome Back!

After a long summer break which flew by faster than lightning, it's time to start classes again. It's difficult to get used to being at work after my wild summer. My husband and I traveled all over southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. We traveled for about 9 weeks, and spent about 5 weeks of that on motorbike. This is a photo from Vietnam. We drove on an old Minsk motorcyle (comes from Russia). It wasn't a high performance bike, but she had a heart of gold, and never broke down in the 2 weeks of muddy riding that we did.