American Culture - Birthday Traditions

I had a small English class this week – several couldn’t get to the university by train because of the snow, one had a badminton tournament, and another didn’t come and I don’t know the reason. For the first part of class, we worked on the lesson from the book about going to the doctor and what all is involved (blood pressure, cardiogram, height and weight measuring, etc.)  I was happy to see that in the book, the picture of the doctor was of a woman and the nurse a man. I was also very pleased with how well my students did on an exercise changing what to expect at the examination (future tense) to what happened at the examination (past tense and first person).

The second part of the class we had a lesson on birthday traditions in the United States.  We played some games I remember from birthday parties when I was a child and I had some little prizes.  The first game was musical chairs. I used music from my iPod.

I remember pin the tail on the donkey, but I opted for pin the candle on the cake for this class. I gave them each a piece of paper and put out crayons and scissors so they could each make a candle. The cake was a color book page I printed from the internet.  The people who were not blindfolded could give directions to the one trying to put the candle on the cake (in English, of course).  The shouted directions were not so helpful, as no candle made it to the top of the cake and one was on the curtain and one on the window.

 

We played another game that I didn’t get a photo of.  I had an odd lot of things on a tray.  I let them look at the items for 60 seconds, then they had to write down what they could remember, using English words.  A few things they didn’t know the name of but gave a good description or alternate word.  I think that is a good skill to have when learning a language.  This game was also a review count and non-count nouns from last semester. They liked the little prizes, even though they were just little things I had around the house.

 We didn’t have cake and ice cream but I did bring some butter cookies from Cosco to finish the class.