Blog 1.2 || Getting Further Acquainted || Shasmeen M.

a curious creature

Goooood day, readers! As of current, our second week has so far been fulfilling our productivity expectations that I hope to see for the rest of the year. 

We began the Monday period with a speedy round of Diffle, the word revealed to be "escort". Then we jumped right into the anticipated vocabulary quiz.

For the vocabulary quiz, we simply needed to spin the wheel on the board to choose the one word we'd need to define and provide an example for. I got the word "dour", an adjective meaning gloomy and ill-humored. I was successful, and once everyone got their turn, essay writing resumed.

Miss Disa decided that we retry the first IELTS task we used in the previous lesson, implementing the tips and techniques we were shown before. This time, the words pieced themselves together much more nimbly (albeit that I wasn't able to integrate as much of the data and trends as I wanted to include due to trying to being more concise and quick), and organization came easily with the structure we were also given.

The next day, we had two periods to make use of. We kicked it off with a new game, "Evil Wordle", yet another variant of the oh so beloved word game. Evil Wordle changes the word as you guess, until you essentially corner it into giving it to you as you get more and more letters right. It was exciting to figure out, and we got the word in the new 5-minute limit we're given for all warm-up games. 

Afterwards, Miss provided more examples from a website for us to dissect and reinvent with the skills we learned prior. After breezing through three of them, we continued the discussion to add more techniques to our expanding repertoire. 

We got the chunking method, where one separates the data and sentences into chunks that can be rephrased or rearranged. Kind of like the Frankenstein approach to essays. After that, Miss Disa showed us the way we could use the way the brain processes and remembers the words themselves to swap around the information, thus making the paraphrasing feel seamless and natural. Lastly, we were taught a way to cut down on excess words by transforming some nouns into adjectives wherever possible. 

After all that was clear, we still had quite some time to spare! We returned to one of the AEP highlights last year: DOGONews. Diving into a scientific story and article about the adaptability of hammerhead sharks’ gills that allow them to take deeper swims was highly fascinating. 

So far, our second week has been a blast. I’m hopeful for what’s coming next, and I’m sure you are too for the next blogs.