Module+7--Decorating+Dorm+Rooms

[[image:The_dorm_001.jpg caption="The dorm on Evergreen Island (neighboring the Administration of Justice Building)"]]
 In this activity, the students take inventory they've "bought" for 0 Lindens at Yadni's Junkyard and decorate their dorm room.

You can see the dorm I've set up on Evergreen Island, below, and the results of the students' efforts in class during their third SecondLife session, when we'd gone shopping at Yadni's Junkyard and then returned to Evergreen Island to decorate.

How it meets the EAP 91/95 grammar, speaking, and writing goals:
This activity is good for the middle of the quarter when students are practicing


 * sentences with "There is" and "There are."
 * prepositions and prepositional phrases such as 'In, at, and on." For example, "There are two couches **in** the living room. There is a fireplace **in** the corner."
 * singular and plural noun forms, and
 * using a, an, or the with singular count nouns.

It is a great activity when practicing simple present verbs to write a descriptive paragraph. In our EAP 95 class, the students had just finished a unit on writing a descriptive paragraph about a painting they'd seen in the TCC Art Gallery. They first took notes on the painting, identified how many major elements or parts to the painting, made an outline and organized the details about the painting like this:

//There are four important things/elements in this painting: the moon, a flower, and eggs.. OR There are three important parts in this painting: top, middle, and bottom.//

Then they wrote a paragraph with this topic sentence and major/minor details describing each element or part.

The room activity was a good follow-up--students decorate their room, then write a paragraph following this model, except that they identify the important parts of their room or the important elements of their room.

**Notes for Teachers: **
You may wish to set up this activity the day before with a couple preliminary steps:
 * teaching relevant vocabulary, such as furniture and building words (this fits in well with a unit on count and non-count nouns)
 * having students draw a floor plan for their room, their furniture, etc. with the new vocabulary accessible to them
 * freewriting about their floor plan in their journals

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