Students at Embassy

Christmas Eve at Embassy

“We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

I hope for you that Christmas celebrations were wonderful with your family, friends or Homestay family; and that the poor turkey was delicious! Here, for the 25th, no turkey, but a fantastic Christmas BBQ with my Homestay family.

In Brisbane, for the last week of the year 2010 and the last day just before the Christmas holidays, the school organized us full of surprises!

Friday December 24th, to celebrate Christmas, we began at the school by a few reviewing of Christmas carols. In my class, we tried to find (or guess) missing words to the lyrics of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer". It's a very funny song, listen:

It made us all laugh!

After, unusually, courses stopped earlier, at 10.30am and ...

Let's go! It's ready for finding Christmas candy hidden in the  school's hallway: the one who catches the most wins the game, and it was a Brazilian girl friend who succeeded to find over a dozen, yummy!

After, go to the 6J room to enjoy Christmas treats and arbitrate a cooking competition of international food, we could taste: grandmother's cookies prepared by an Australian teacher, Taiwanese ravioli, a Korean recipe, and an apple pie ... a French version cooked by Loic and I, re-yummy! Look!

Then, we could choose between lots of different activities:

• Cards and origami: many beautiful christmas cards, and thank you Tom for teaching us the traditional Japanese art of origami. We could create a star, a crane, a ball...
• Board games
• Learn to sing Christmas carols
• Christmas trivia and games with prizes

Cards and origami

The Christmas tree with origami, so cute!

 

I choose the Christmas trivia and we laughted a lot.

There were several teams of 4, I was in the team "Pearl Harbour" with Swiss and Brazilian friends. And the game was to recognize the characters of Christmas, answer quizzes ... while being fast. And we won the first prize: Tim-Tam (it's a delicious chocolate cake) Re-re-yummy!

Christmas is not Christmas without Santa Claus and Christmas presents.

So going Santa Claus home: before each student had to buy a small gift and we exchanged that day. For my part, I offered a small plush and Santa Claus brought me a fish purse.

Friends and I with Christmas presents, I love my lovely fish purse.

Finally, Christmas cards created by students were delivered to their owners.
And for those who wanted, in the afternoon, there was a Christmas movie and free popcorn.

It was a very good start to Christmas.

Meet Juwita, our new blogger from Melbourne

Hello everybody!

My name is Juwita, I'm 18 years old and I come from Germany.

I started my language course at Embassy Melbourne on the 5th July, so I have been here for about a month. So far, it has been great =)

Directly on the first day, I met new students, because we formed little groups and introduced ourselves to the others. Since then, I have been meeting Jenny (Germany), Aya (Japan) and Stephania (Columbia). It's because we were all afraid of not finding new friends, that we were glad to find nice, open-minded people.
The teachers and the staff are great - so funny and helpful!

In Germany, I just finished highschool and because Australia is said to be an amazing country, I decided to spend the time until university starts in October abroad. I have already been to England three times, so it was time for something different.

I need to improve my English, because a lot of essays for my studies (either law or medecine) will be in English.

Apart from the lessons, I participated in some great trips with the school: Tim Burton Exhibition, Melbourne Aquarium, Edward Scissorhands...

I really enjoy my time "down under"; the only thing I definitely miss is the sun. In here, it's winter and in Germany they have got summer... I'm just glad that the Australian winter is not as cold as the German one. You hardly get snow in Melbourne, because it's still 5-15°C "warm".

C u soon.

PS: The photo shows me drinking "bubble tea". It originally comes from Taiwan, but because Melbourne is multicultural, they have got it here as well!

Read more about Embassy Melbourne on our main website.

How are you doing everybody?

This post will be a kind of diary.
The reason I wrote this is I've felt many things and been given a lot of advice from people around me.

I've spent busy days recently. I don't even remember what I did last week. I tried to figure out that what made me like that last weekend.

From after a month I arrived here, I got tired, became lazy and started to think too much. When I was in highschool, I used to often speculate on my future, and it helped me a lot to decide whatever it was when I grew up.

But I figured that I'd better become more simple. Because I have things which I have to do at the moment and my thinking keeps myself from doing my duty.

Actually I was thinking of two things which are time I've got and the ways of studying English. I'm pretty sure that many young students don't know about the feeling of burden of responsibility.

The kind of resposibility which I feel is that I have to support my family after going back to Korea. My father will retire this year and my brother is still a student - he's 2 years younger than me. So if I can't find and get a good job enough to support my family, it will be a very bad situation that I don't want to imagine.

When I realized that my study was not better as much as I had expected, I started to be obsessed by the idea - "I don't have enough time."

My friends, flatmates, teachers and family felt that and everybody told me that don't be such in a hurry.
Honestly, it wasn't helpful but it made me think in different way (more positive) and then realized that it'd be much better to enjoy this time.

And I came to believe what Nadia,my teacher, said I've got enough time and I've been doing well. ^^ - I always thank you Nadia. -

So when I started to feel much better and got back to normal life, I started again to study. As I confess, I'm really, really bad at listening...
So Nadia told me a good way to practice listening skills.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/

 

If you Google "BBC learning English", you'll find this site and can study English. It has everything.

I practice with the category of "the words in the news". Its length and the level of words are suitable to practice listening.

How do I practice? - At first, I study the words which are bold, listen to the article and write it down without looking the script.

After finishing that I correct the script I wrote down and listen again till I can understand the article completely.

It seems a short article but the sentences are very good so if you can understand the article completely and use the sentences, your English will be considered very advanced.

I've been doing this for 3 weeks. I still have difficulty understanding the news but I'm quite sure that I'm getting better. If there are students who have the same problem as me, I really hope this will help them improve their listening skills.

Thank you for reading my boring story again. ^^
I promise that I'll be a good student and blogger!
Cheers~!

Photos from Marianne

You may have already enjoyed Marianne's posts describing life in Fort Lauderdale. Now she shares some photos which show you a little bit more: after all, a picture speaks a thousand words, as we know.

 

Top to bottom:

1. Marianne walks to school barefoot along the beach. What a life!

2. Our student with the school's 'wonderful and lovely' Director, Leslie.

3. Marianne with her class, and teacher Stephen Shasha. "I've learnd a lot of English", says Marianne.