Last Class

Thank you Level 5 students!

Your perseverance and enthusiasm made the classes wonderful. It's so great to see students graduate with the confidence to speak English and how it changes them. You worked hard and practiced. I hope your new English skills will make your life easier and better. I'm also happy that you made new friends and built relationships while you were students here at Queens Community House. I hope you all keep in touch. You can always reach me through this website and don't forget about our Facebook group for Queens Community House English School.

Green Agenda Meeting and Immigration Reform Rally in Washington, D.C.

Green Agenda Meeting
This was a very active weekend for Queens Community House. We went to the meeting in the Renaissance Charter School for the Green Agenda for Jackson Heights on Saturday where we talked about 7 different topics:

• transportation, parking, & traffic
• garbage & recycling
• ?
• green jobs
• equality
• housing
• parks

I participated in a group with students Rene, Guillermo, Fabricio, teacher Bruce, and director Mary talked about equality in Jackson Heights.

Immigration Reform Rally
We also had about 70 students travel to Washington, D.C., accompanied by Anna Dioguardi, Farzana Morshed, and Adam Skarbinski to rally for immigration reform*. The weather was beautiful this weekend, which helped 200,000+ people voice their demand for their rights. President Barack Obama told us by video that he supported us. Let's make sure he doesn't forget us! Although it was wonderfully inspiring to see so many people together for such an important cause, I sincerely hope that we don't have to do it ever again because our goal of legalization and rights will have come true.

*I was there drumming with Minkwon Center, after having spent Saturday night in Fairfax, Va.

After Level 5 and other Resources

For some of you this will be your last time in the computer lab. You can always come back to this page to find more ways to improve your English and also resources about different things, even after you finish your time at Queens Community House.

Check the links on the right under "Education" and you'll find schools and classes with more advanced levels than we have here.

This week we talked about jobs and worker's rights.

You can look for a job, an apartment, and used stuff (and a lot of other things) on Craig's List.

You can find out more about the women in Made in L.A. on that website.

Worker's Rights and International Women's Day

Worker's Rights and International Women's Day are linked and today we watched a film that drew the lines between them. Made in L.A. is about 3 immigrant women who each grow in different ways while also leading a boycott against the clothing store, Forever 21.

We had a short discussion before watching the film. While watching, students were to try to understand the vocabulary words on this handout.

The movie introduces the topic of worker's rights which we will learn more about using Right to Work Understanding Immigrant Employment Rights from the New York City Human Rights Commission.

1. Listen to this news story about the Mediterranean Diet and fill in the blanks
   

   People who follow a Mediterranean diet _______________ happier in life. This is the conclusion of a new report published in the journal ‘Archives of General Psychiatry’. The study’s authors say a diet _______________ vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains and fish seems to make people less likely to develop depression. This _______________ people who live in Mediterranean countries are _______________ than other Europeans. There are fewer mental disorders in Mediterranean countries and scientists believe _______________ because of the diet. The new research supports previous studies that suggested olive _______________ depression. No Italian, Spanish or Greek meal is complete without olive oil.

   Researchers from Spain’s University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the Clinic of the University of Navarra, Pamplona asked 10,000 _______________ track of what they ate. The scientists _______________ habits and instances of depression for four years. They discovered there was a thirty per cent _______________ developing depression in people who stuck to the Mediterranean diet. The research team says _______________ why this diet reduces the likelihood of depression. They said the diet could _________________ performance and increase the body’s efficiency to produce oxygen. Both these things make the brain and heart perform better. If our mind and body are healthier, it _______________ will be happier.

2. Do this quiz about the story.
3. Practice phrasal verbs by clicking on the EFLNet.com link on the right.

Three kinds of phrasal verbs

You can find all the phrasal verbs we studied in class here.

Nonseparable Phrasal Verb Exercercises

Here are the exercises for nonseparable phrasal verbs that we worked on this week.

Phrasal Verbs and Nutrition this week

Last week we started to talk about phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs have two or more words, usually a verb and a preposition. Together they may mean something quite different from each word separately. For example, "look up" means "research; it does not mean look at the sky or ceiling.

The first group we learned about was separable phrasal verbs. This group needs to separate the verb from the preposition when a pronoun is used. For example, call up, call him up. When a noun is the object, it can go in the middle or after the the phrasal verb. For example, call up John or call John up.

Here's a dictionary of phrasal verbs.

We also started to talk about nutrition by speculating about some facts and playing a game.