Last week's lesson

Dear Students,

During last week's lesson in the computer room,  I was happy to see that you finished the grammar part so quickly (although the online quiz was not perfect!). It was good that we were in the computer room, because after the grammar lesson, you could easily practice the "Green Street" summary using online bilingual dictionaries, while we discussed the writing techniques together.

To practice gerunds and infinitives with stop, try, remember etc., let's write about traveling and make sentences like these:

On the way home...
On the way to (a place, a city)...

I'll go first.
On the way home today, I saw a strange guy in the Metro. At the end station, he tried to say goodbye to all the passengers, but nobody would speak to him!
On the way to Prague in the train this summer, the Spanish passengers in my compartment almost never stopped talking! Sometimes they stopped to play with their Blackberry, but most of the time they talked and talked.

Now it's your turn...

Grammar for you!

Today we are practicing infinitives and gerunds with a change of meaning.

First do the quiz. What was you score? Tell your neighbor!

Now read about this grammar rule.

Do the quiz again. Was your score better? Tell your teacher!

Now, don't forget to use these grammar forms in writing and speaking!

Now here's the song "Remember to Forget" by Play. Enjoy!

Well, I, too, am still here. It's a good summer, full of new "roots" going down (I mean, some new kinds of English teaching). I set up a 2-week intensive course, and soon I will do a workshop about technology in teaching.

I went up to "Virág's" flower garden just below the "A" building this week. Things are awfully dry, not much blooming. But there is plenty of "bablevelű várjúháj" (Sedum maximum, apparently called orpine in English - but it's really an Eastern European plant). The orpine is doing very well in spite of the intense heat. Hey, translators! How do you say bablevelű várjúháj in English?

Mary

I'm still here - and so is the garden.

It's been quite a while since I put anything up here, but I haven't been idle - just posting elsewhere.

The 2009 Garden saga continues on my personal website -

http://warrenbuckles.com/

Where you can also find this creature:

As well as one of the key questions of our time.

wb

Our spring has been wet enough since late April, but it was dry before that - from late March to late April we had no rain at all and things got pretty dry.

So dry, in fact, that I almost burned my woodshed down!

We usually burn our previous year's accumulation of brush in the spring. This year we did it during the second week of April. There was a lot of very dry brush so it was a very hot fire. It got into an old stump on the fenceline. I sprayed the stump with water and got it (mostly) out. A few hours later it burst back into flame and set off the dry grass that had collected under the fence over the winter. By the time we noticed it the flames were several meters high and heading for our woodshed. But I had kept the hose out and got the fire under control in a few minutes.

It didn't rain from late March to late April - about five weeks. But the last three weeks have been at or above normal (about 25 mm/week), so things are greening up very well, as you can see below.

Watering

Hy

I'm just courious about your weather, becouse we have got very dry spring.

A visitor

We had a visitor on Sunday - a black swallowtail butterfly. These are common this time of year http://wisconsinbutterflies.org/butterfly/species/3-black-swallowtail