Stephanie TS # 14

Thursday 2:00-3:00 PM CIES. Today I tutored Ahmed again expecting to finish going over the speaking part of the IELTS exam; however, with it being the last day there was a lot of exciting stuff going on around us. Mrs. Felicia’s class was in the lounge playing an extremely fun and lively game of Taboo with her whole class. I told Ahmed we should spend around half the session finishing up the speaking lesson, but I could tell he just wanted to be a part of the fun. We eventually joined the game which turned out to be a great way to practice using English as a communication tool and to build vocabulary, so I didn’t feel so bad about putting off the IELTS studying. The student would get a card with a word like “Pretzel” and they would have to describe this word to their team without using certain banned words listed on the card. For example, the banned words for describing pretzel were “salty,” “snack,” “twisted,” and a few others. This made it very challenging and encouraged the students to really use their knowledge of the language to work around the banned words. A personal favorite round from the game was when Mrs. Felicia picked up the word “billionaire,” and said “Trump is a…,” and without a beat a student responded “racist.” I really loved seeing all the students with all different first languages come together to use what they’ve learned in CIES classes to communicate in English to win the game. I definitely will use this game as a fun way to practice communication skills with ESL/EFL students in the future!