Another class day. We had a full room -- M, my former student from Iran, returned. She had been back in her native country for the past 4 month and only returned the end of last week. Today she came bearing gifts -- a box of chocolates to share with the class, and from Iran a pound of walnuts and a pair of shoes for me. The shoes are sandals and they fit! She says they are very comfortable and I know she wears hers when she is taking a walk. I've received many gifts through the years but it was a first to receive shoes. However, I know she is proud of her country so I accepted her gift graciously.
---After class my Korean student asked if she could take me to lunch -- to a place of my choosing. We went to a place she didn't know about and she was delighted with the food and prices and thanked me for telling her about it. We had a nice visit during lunch -- got off on the subject of quilting, and I believe she will start coming to The King's Quilters in November. She said she had bought herself a machine but she didn't know how to use it. I told her, just bring it along and I'll teach you. She is excited.
------Today we studied the structure of sentences. We started with one subject (noun) and one verb and built from there. It is hard, especially for my Spanish speakers, to get the noun/adjective order the English way, so while we added words to our basic sentence we were able to practice putting them in the right order. I was very pleased with their journals today -- they were much better than last week as far as sentence structure was concerned. F finally brought his homework and he is very good! I made a few corrections but, basically, he did a good job. Well, actually they all did.
---------We also studied capitalization. I gave them 7 rules and then we read sentences, underlined the capitalized words, and gave the number of the rule that applied. Most of them were right in step. I gave them a few sentences to bring to the next class. I didn't read the directions to them beforehand -- I want to see if they do the right thing.
------------F asked for a special class on the pronunciation of English vowels. Many of my students have studied English in their native countries and already do a good job pronouncing English words. However, I don't mind scheduling such a class somewhere in the future.
----------------M unknowingly fell into the theme of our previous writing on colors by describing a wedding she attended in Iran. The bride had two dresses (the wedding lasted 2 days) -- one was white and one was red. The students found that interesting.

Well, it is warm and it isn't raining so I'm going out a little later to mow the grass. It has really grown in all the rain we've had.