Here We Are Again, on the Pages of Our Third Issue, the First One in the New Academic Year

Well, well, well… Here we are again, on the pages of our third issue, the first one in the new academic year. We are celebrating one-year- birthday hoping to entertain you the way we did before. Our first year turned out to be very fruitful: “Scrabble” took the first prize at the School Scientific Conference and moreover, we won at the Moscow School Media Projects Contest “Moscow Broadcasting”. There is a cause to be proud of. Autumn is the time for summarizing. Successes and failures, victories and defeats. Labour and leisure. That’s why in “Around English” rubric you’ll have a chance to get acquainted with an extremely useful research “Moscow Through the Eyes of a Foreigner” made by the former 10 Form students, also the winners among 9-11 Forms of our School Scientific Conference. We are also remembering summer now. Hot, stuffy, smoky, burning. Bright, immense, gor- geous. Unforgettable! And we are very happy to have new authors who joined our friendly com- pany. Welcome everybody! Yours, Elena Bespalchikova Table of contests: Faces: Top summer activities…………………………………….2 Privacy…………………………………………………….4 Spots: Travel the world…………………………………………..6 Around English: Enrich your mind……………………………..10 Moscow Through the Eyes of a Foreigner…….16 Fun: What do we play?…………………………………………...24 Remembering summer………………………………………28 Otsebiashki………………………………………………….29 1 Faces Top Summer Activities As summer begins, after a long time studying at school, a feeling of happiness and spirit of freedom approaches you. You take a look at the shining sun, you step on the green grass and breathe in the fresh summer air. Even if the weather is not as warm as you would like, some precious summer feelings rule your emotions. By the way, suddenly you realize that you have much more free time, comparing with what you had before. That is the most common teenagers’ conclusion, after all. You have only few months to enjoy your summer time, so then comes a question – How ? Of course, there are many answers to this question, many ideas and ways of getting them alive. Everyone chooses the right way of spending time during the summer, according to his/her prefer- ences. Anastasia Volfson We’ve considered some ideas by inter- rogating teenagers from our educational centre. Here are the results: The majority like to spend their summer time in CAMPS, 42%. The second part belongs to DACHA, 27% , as we call it. SEASIDE holidays got 19%. And in the end of our list is resting at HOME. “Going to the seaside” holiday means that spending your time would be connected with water, beaches and sun. You get positive emotions, everything seems to be good. Staying in dacha, if you really like nature or you have some friends there, is cool! There you can just forget the city and enjoy the summer time. If you don’t go anywhere, if you just stay at home, it’s not the mat- ter to become upset. There are many things you can do in the city. You can hang out with friends, ride you bicycle, try rollerblad- ing… Anything you want, you must only choose, what to do. If staying at camp is what you prefer, you should expect to do many interesting activities, conversations and make new friends. Also, there are some special kinds of camps to choose from. The sport-camps are often visited by extra active teenagers, who can’t only sit and do nothing. In that kind of camp you just don’t have the chance to waste your time, you are always doing something. These camps include various activities, such as dancing, sport competitions and so on. 2 2 1 Faces Last summer holidays I was in a sport dance camp and now I want to tell you about living in it. In the morning at 7:00 am you must wake up and wash up, after that you do morning exercises. In the canteen at 9:00 am you have breakfast, very tasty by the way. Then if you don’t have individual lessons you have your own spare time that you can spend swimming in the sea. After lunch you have the same activities. At your lessons you can learn every kind of dance you want: Hip Hop, Locking, Popping and so on. At 5:00 pm you have a break- dance lesson and after dinner you study hip hop with a trainer. If you do sport dances, you have training all day long and in the evening you have a lesson where you show what you have learned after all day. At the end of the camp shift a compe- tition for everybody is held. By Alex Motunov The next are the linguistic camps. The programme in these camps is based on language lessons, that can’t be separated from the other camps activities. In the course of the time when you do something, you have to use the foreign language, which is taught in this camp. This summer I spent three amazing weeks in a linguistic camp in Oxford, UK. It was really unusual for me to live in the country, where you have to speak English only, to deal with different lifetime situations, using foreign language, make friends from other countries. Actually, everything was new to me, but I had to get used to it. Our residence was situated in a quiet Oxford neighbour- hood, so every morning we had to take U5 bus to get to the Brookes University, where the lessons were held. Also there was a big canteen for students like us. My group was full of teenagers who came from Spain, Ger- many, Italy. I should admit, that sometimes it was too dif- ficult to have conversations with friends from other countries, because their speech was hardly being understood even by the teachers. Well, while spending so much time together, doing many interesting activities, it’s almost nec- essary to speak, speak and again speak. When some time passed I realised it wasn’t a big problem. Anyway, after all you can speak not only English but also some Spanish, German, Italian...As your friends have already learned some Russian from you ! Initially, there came the same problem connected with understanding the speech. How hard was it to recog- nise the meaning of what the English said ! Once we were given a quiz about Oxford, so the only way to do it was going to the city centre and asking English people these questions. Also, we really had to get used to the pronunciation. It was good practice, hard practice. However, after three weeks living in Oxford, we could fluently speak to the natives. Of course, we had some very interesting excursions to the most popular places in Oxford, which are the col- leges, castles, towers. We’ve also been to London twice. I don’t know what else to add, but I can briefly say - these three weeks were unforgettable. Now I want to see England again, and maybe even live, study there. Now I have many international friends, every day we chat by email or Facebook. Living in Oxford makes an impression ! Nasty Volfson The last are the healthy camps, where you would do exercises, take some medicine, where you would be given a chance to improve your health. Traditional camps offer a relaxed atmosphere where activities are wonderfully different from those in the city. Children are challenged to participate and to be the best they can be because organizers provide that kind of envi- ronment. At camp it is understood that there is excellence in the effort. There, children encourage exposure to all facets of camp life, and leaders help each camper acquire new skills, and to refine old ones. Camp offers time for free and spontaneous expression and promotes involvement for the joy of sharing the experience. It is fun. Camp is the satisfaction of friends having a great time together within a structured program. It is the place to awaken curiosity, and the space to dis- cover oneself. Liz Shvedova 3 3 1 Faces Privacy: Eugenia Teterskaya First of all I want to say that I really liked the idea of this column. Thank you for inviting me to share with the readers of your wonderful magazine my hobbies, interests and prefer- ences, which I have outside the school. I picked up a few photos, although it was not easy. A lot of interesting, impressive and simply dear to your heart things surround us throughout our life. Music. As long as I can remember, from the earliest years, I played the piano. At first reluctantly, made by a grandmother, but every year the interest in music classes grew, I spend hours without leaving the instrument. Boring scales and etudes were replaced by works of Chopin, Bach, Mo- zart ... Playing the piano became my profession. Books. It so happened that the home library, which has been collected in our family for decades, was placed in my room when I was a schoolgirl. How nice it is there were no computers! It was a hobby bedtime – to take a book from the shelf. Rereading almost all Russian and foreign classics at a young age seemed normal. We have nothing to brag about now. Just like you all, I spend my free time surfing the internet, and only occasionally, for fun, I take favorite books and reread them without hesitating, enjoying meeting my favorite authors and good books. 4 4 1 Faces P.S. To be absolutely honest - find in this photo 5 items that I like and need most of all every evening.

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