Episode 15 - Life Project - a podcast by ESL in Ho Chi Minh City

To kindle your creativity as well as make light work of your English learning, we thought of an activity called “Life project”. If you look "life" up in a dictionary, you will find its transcription; “life” ends with a dipthong: the vowel sound /ai/. We would like you to find all possible words ending with this /ai/ sound. Below are our examples classified according to their parts of speech.

Noun: light, sight, tight, knight, night, height, fight, flight, sky, line, eye, dice, ice, rice, lice, mice, spy, spice, pie, kite, side, size, nine, five, knife, wife, wine, why, sci-fi, vice, mind, site, guy, bike
Pronoun: mine, I
Verb: fly, buy, tie, drive, ride, hike, type, write, rise, shine, hide, lie, die, pry, whine, slide, might, find, like, bite, sigh, sign, dive, invite, provide, decide, surprise, design
Adjective: my, right, bright, tight, nice, fine, kind, polite, shy, sly, blind, slight, high
Adv: quite
Prep: behind, by, beside
Exclamation: hi

After you finish listing all the /ai/ sound ending words, try to put them in a meaningful sentence. Here are a few tasks for you:
1 Find an expression that contains an /ai/ sound ending word.
Ex: One’s stomach is bigger than one’s eye
2 Make a sentence that ends with an /ai/ word
Ex: I don’t know why you said goodbye. (Boulevard lyrics)
3 Make a paragraph in which all sentences finish with an /ai/ word. This is slightly the same as task 2 but all your sentences must connect in some way.

In this lesson, we are going to teach you proverbs that have at least one /ai/ dipthong word in them. Proverbs are sayings that date back from long ago and give us useful advice. Here are three proverb exercises:

Exercise 1: Re-arrange these sentences to make meaningful proverbs:

mice/ cat/ will/ play/the/ when/ is the/ away
in/ beauty/ of/ beholder/ the/ is/ eye/ the
the/ spare/ and/ spoil/ child/ the/ rod
right/ wrongs/ a/ don’t/ two/ make
is/ while/ hot/ the/ strike/ iron
the/ life/ variety/ spice/ is/ of
time/ a/ saves/ stitch/ in/ nine
wishes/ beggars/ horses/ if/ might/ were/ ride
comes/ fall/ pride/ before/ a
life/ hope/ is/ there/ where/ is/ there

Exercise 2: Match the above proverbs with their meanings

If you do not punish a child for behaving badly, he/ she will behave badly in the future
If you are too proud or confident, something may happen which will make you look foolish
People enjoy themselves more and behave with more freedom when the person in charge of them is not there
Do something immediately because now is a good time to do it
What one person thinks is beautiful may not seem beautiful to somebody else
Wishing for something does not make it happen
If someone does something bad to you, it doesn’t give you the right to do the same way to them
A variety of different activities, interests, people, etc. makes your life more enjoyable
In a bad situation, you must not give up hope because there is always a chance that it will be better
If you act immediately when something goes wrong, it will save you a lot more work later

Exercise 3: Use the above proverbs in the correct context

A: Beauby is a spoiled little brat. Did you see how Rich pampered her? No wonder the other day she talked back to her teacher at school.
B: ______________________________

A: Have you met John’s girl friend? I can’t wait to be introduced to her. He kept talking about her. I bet she must look great.
B: Well, __________________________. Believe it or not, she’s just a plain Jane.

A: It seems all doors are closed to Mike. He was fired; his wife left him and his own company went bankrupt.
B: He still has a house and I heard he’s done with the mortgage. ______________________
He can start it over.

A: Pitt keeps bragging about his success.
B: He went over my head to present his idea of a new robot with the director. Just he waits; ____________________. Let’s hope his new product won’t make any mistakes.

A: Why are you sitting here? Aren’t you supposed to be writing that sales report?
B: Give me a break! _______________________________________. The director is on vacation until next week, and I don’t think I should prove myself to you or anyone else here.

A: Mike deflated my tyre after school the other day and I had to walk home for 30 minutes. I’m going to play a prank on him this time.
B: Come on! ___________________________. If you do it, you’re not different from him.

When asked what they wanted in life, my students normally said they wanted to have lots of money, a big house, a sports car, a beautiful wife. But when I asked them how they would get those things, they had no idea. Then I would say to them “_______________________________”

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