Mining English: Student Journal Example (Verbatim)

July 9th

-----Minecraft World-----

We were in the small island.

Today, We were going to built our house in here.

Before we started, I had explored around the island to find a nice place for our house.

Finally, I found a really nice plain, it's next to a mountain, many animals live in there.

It would be an useful farm.

We suggested each ideas to design our house.

Finally, we decided as follows.

*The house is a two story house. The range of each floor is 16*16*8(actually, I don't remember each numbers clearly...).

*Use wooden planks to construct the standard of our house.

*Make a double door.

*Set windows on each walls.

*Place torches on each floor.

We started building our house.

I put wooden planks on the plain to make the floorboard.

It was hard work to correct stuffs.

Finally, We finished building the first floor.

Next week, We will built the second floor and fight monsters.

I'm looking forward to do it.

July 16th

We continued building our house.

We didn't have much time, so we had to do it as soon as possible.

click... click... click......

We had spend a lot of wooden planks quickly.

Finally, We had done it!

As I wrote, the range of our house is 16*16*(8+8). Our house looks like a big square.

However, it may save us from monster's attack.

Then, monsters had appeared.

Zombies... Skeletons... Creepers...

I know how to beat animals, but I didn't know how to kill monsters.

We swung swords to kill monsters.

Some players was died, and revived.

Suddenly a creeper exploded, Sadly our house was broken.

After we repaired our house, we explored the cave.

I paired with York to find the diamond.

Everyone were digging the cave.

We found a lot of golds, however we couldn't find a diamond...

It was a grateful challenge.

July 30th 

We were going to play HungerGame.

We learned what it is.

We made each idea, how to alive from HungerGame.

I choosed 3 stuffs to alive.

*Shovel

*Flask

*Lighter

I may use the shovel to dig and hide something, and fight and protect myself.

To fill water, I'll use the flask.

Lighter can burn foods and make me keep warm.

Unfortunately, we couldn't play HungerGame on Minecraft.

So we enjoyed Nether world.

We fought with pig zombies first.

Suddenly, Ghast appeared and attacked us, it caused us confuse!

I shot Ghast an allow, and Ghast died.

Nether is mysterious and horrible...

After we enjoyed Nether, we walled around the minecraft world...

We had enjoyed Minecraft a lot.

Extra

What is FPS?

What is virtual world?

What is Minecraft?

In Minecraft,

we can do any choice just we want,

we can choose our way by myself.

The WORLD has been created by amazing originality.

Dream inside the virtual world, This is what I see on the Minecraft world.

Mining English Week 5

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Some pics from this weeks session.

The focus of this week's lesson was the use of prepositions. Something that comes very naturally and is essential in the Minecraft world. Before we got in game we went through prepositions one by one and then we practised building simple objects with Lego. This prepared students for using prepositions in the game.

I built a world for students to work in pairs where the activity required them to explain to their partner how to construct increasingly complex shapes out of various wool blocks. The final task had students working pairs to build a house together. Students paired up, logged in, and went to their relevant station.

Students were also told today about their test that they will be having at the end of the semester. The test will be comprised of two parts. The first part they will have to tell a native speaker how to build an object, and the second part of the test, the native speaker will tell them how to build an object. Students will be graded on how well they build each object, or in other words: how well they were able to communicate their ideas in English.

Mining English Week 4

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Just a few pics of my fourth 'Mining English' class.

Today students completed an information gap exercise which had them explaining to a partner how to craft certain objects (with reference to the Minecraft wiki of course).

All in all a good lesson.