What we did with nouns--Act them!

S.A.P. #10

Just this recent Thursday we began our new lesson non-verbal communication and it was here our teacher assigned us to do an activity: guessing the word the 'actress' is conveying.
So the mechanics went like this:
The group has to guess as many nouns as possible, with one of the members doing the acting while the rest guesses and all of this has to be done in three minutes. The group that has many guesses wins.
The words like 'horror', 'confusion', 'bitterness', 'bravery', 'hope', 'tension' and more were, to me, not act-able, as I found it hard to do 'horror' without screaming at the top of my lungs and crawling around like Sadako in 'The Ring' and 'hope' turned out to be a joke as I tried 'look hopeful' while having slightly wistful but silly eyes, my hands clasped together in my chest like a hopeless nutcase.

I know this was in all due fun, as I was laughing my head off, both because of my clumsy acting and from the other group's really aggressive take on trying to guess what she was acting about.

I remember a similar thing that my cousin, my brother and I did this last Christmas. We have named the game 'Daring Consequence', because we mixed the 'Dare' in Truth or Dare and Consequence because we have to act what was said in the slip of paper which we will pick at a random pile.
It was just the three of us, but it was a hell lot of fun. I remembered trying to act like the ugly duckling, quacking and trying to look ugly to them and one of them guessed I was trying to be a cow(seriously? a cow quacking?). We laughed our heads off when we saw our brother dancing almost like Micheal Jackson while singing Kesha's song 'We r who we r!' and my cousin clapping his hands in a weird manner and we couldn't guess what he was trying to portray. 'I was a scissor!' he told us, then we hollered at this maniacally.

Life is good.

XD

Poetry Night - Aria 955(...555) XD

S.A.P. #9

The day of judgement has come. I was perspiring a bit as I heard the news from my classmate, that our teacher is going to play the finished product of our project in poetry reading. I calmly drew out a breath as I know that logically, this isn't going the world, no!
Then, the inevitable arrived: we were going to hear ourselves read our poems out loud while she(our teacher) played it in her laptop. My hands went clammy. I remembered that I stammered when I was reciting my poem during recording. This is a bad omen. This is it!
I buried my head in resignation inside my arms as we(my classmates) laughed it off, trying to shake the horrible feeling of embarrassment. Well actually, it was funny, hearing ourselves recite the poem with all our hearts while we are now in a classroom, completely not in our 'poem phase'. It was as if the voices we were hearing aren't really ours and it's hard to believe that we had made it this far as to recite these poems with total grandiose.

Anyway, I did feel finally great to have heard my own voice speaking my poem like any poet would voice out theirs. I just did what I have to do just to put my shoes in the narrator in the poem (by the way, my poem is 'If' by Rudyard Kipling).
I did feel for my poem and I felt very happy for the presentation we had all achieved to do.

Maybe in the future, I could find a job as a radio DJ or something and I'll name the station to Aria 955 LOL! XD

The International Phoneme Alphabet.

S.A.P. #8

Since the end of Midterms, all that we have been learning from (S.A.P.)class is pronunciation, enunciation, assimilation, phonemes, etc. In other words, how we pronounce the English words clearly and correctly.
Recently, we've been learning in our S.A.P. class of the symbols that correspond to what kind of pronunciation we should produce when we see this, most especially in dictionaries.

For example, the long 'ee' sound in words like 'equal', 'seat', 'meat', 'easy', etc. has the phonetic symbol /i:/; so if you encounter this on a dictionary, thesaurus, or any kind of pronunciation book that can help you pronounce words that has this pronunciation.
The short 'ee' sound, in words like 'hit', 'kit', 'ship', 'furniture', has the phonetic symbol /I/.
The 'Eh' sound, in words like 'edge', 'set', 'merry', 'egg', 'head', have the phonetic symbol /E/ or an inverted number three that is actually like an epsilon in Greek language.
/a:/ is the phonetic symbol for a long 'Ah' sound, like 'part', 'calm', 'lock' and more.

Diphthongs are a pair of vowel sounds combined together:
/eI/-for 'age', 'drape', 'cape', 'bake', 'lake'.
/aI/-for 'bite', 'pirate', 'deny', 'ice', 'eye'.
/(I/-for 'oil', 'joint', 'joy', 'boy', 'coin'.
/au/-for 'plow', 'out', 'loud', 'cow', 'owl'.

In Consonants, most of it is easy, since what we have basically learned about how we pronounce it in elementary is still unchanged.
But words like 'thin', 'ether', 'path', 'think', 'breath' has the symbol /θ/, which is a voiceless 'th' sound, compared to its other voiced 'th' sound that has the symbol /ð/, for words like 'that', 'the', 'either', 'this', 'then'.
The 'sh', 'zsh', 'ch', 'juh' sounds have the respective symbols /sh/, /3/, /tS/ and /d3/.

If you want to look up for more of what the symbols look like, we have the internet and the libraries for research. All in all, the lesson was a great topic, something I knew I would need when I see a very difficult word that I cannot pronounce and I have to see the dictionary for it.

See you and have a good day! XD

January 1st of 2011 in my neighborhood had been the safest first day.

S.A.P. #7

Note: This entry will also serve as a journal to remind me that fireworks don't need to be the only equipment to celebrate the start of a New Year.

"Imbis na bumili ng paputok, bumili na lang sila ng pagkain, para salu-salo lahat sa bagong taon," says an old lady from Tondo as me and my family, while driving back home on the evening of the last day of December, listened to the AM news radio as both my parents agreed to what she had said.

She was right. Not only do we have to celebrate the coming of the New Year with our closest people and with our brothers and sisters, but we have to celebrate it wisely and safely.

Take this example on the night when 2011 came:
Jan. 1st, 2011, 12 midnight. My cousins and I decided to head to our grandfather's office despite the fact that the whole neighborhood was going gaga over the fireworks display they were doing just so we can greet him a Happy New Year. Luckily he was already on his way out of his office and we saved the time of going in.
after the pleasantries of greeting other people, we resumed to one of our usual reflexes: Watching the fireworks display.

So okay everything was dazzling, but suddenly one of our neighbors was going to light his firework when--BAM!--his firework fell off his gate and came exploding its sparks on the ground, almost burning a kid's foot when his parent got him to safety!

But besides that incident, nothing mortifying has endangered us and the whole neighborhood. But a few days later, I kept hearing and watching news that people are getting hospitalized because of accidents regarding fireworks.
What's the point of a great banging New Year if you're going to put yourselves in danger? Why is also that people are still firing up fireworks when the New Year has already passed?

People have to learn that safety is a priority and I just hope that when New Year 2012 comes people should come to their senses about their safety.