Daylight savings confusion

Monday I had some very mixed up students. One in fact was late for class because his cell phone had automatically adjusted to the time change on the weekend and that was his alarm clock. More confusing yet is that neither Saudi Arabia nor China change to daylight savings time yet here their electronic clocks mysteriously changed. When I started to try and explain the time change with the map I realized the late student was not yet really awake because he was looking for Saskatoon in the country of China.

I thought most of this confusion made sense in parts of the country and the world where the time is actually changed, but apparently it carries over to Saskatchewan.

My Chinese Halloween

This year my Halloween celebrations were a little Chinese. This was in part due to the fact that I was with my ESL class in which nine of the eleven students are from China, and also due to the theme we chose for our costumes. Because in all we are twelve in our class I suggested we have the costume theme of the Chinese zodiac animals. At first everyone was quite willing and enthusiastic, but then when they actually understood that they were going to have to dress up as the animals the idea was less popular. The day before Halloween to prepare them I came to class in my sheep costume. I had on my sheep sweater, my paper plate mask and an elastic at the back of my sweater to make a small tail. I told them that night they had to think of ideas for their animal.

That day after class we carved our pumpkins. Amongst the designs we had a couple of more traditional faces, a bat, a spider, a skeleton, a mummy and a vampire. All these were carved in under an hour. The next day they learned how to make paper plate masks.

See if you can recognize the animals in the photo below from left to right starting with the front row: ox, dog, snake, dragon, rat, (back row) tiger, rooster, monkey, rabbit, horse and sheep.