I am happy to get your letter. Do you want ____ about my schoollife this week? This week I ____ three English classes. I learn some new words. And we also ____ an interesting movie in the class. Its name is Home Alone. I like ____ very much. I like having P.E. ____ Mr. White is my P.E. teacher. He is my favorite teacher. He is great ____, and we all like to play ____ him. In ____ class, he teaches us to play basketball, soccer and ping-pong. This week, our class has a basketball game with Class 5 and we win (赢). I like playing ____ best and I want to be a great basketball player. What about you? Can you ____ me something interesting in your school?

Write to me soon.

Yours,

Emma

When you are reading something in English, you may often meet a new word. What’s the best way to know it?

You may look it up in the English-Chinese dictionary. It will tell you something about the word: the pronunciation (发音), the part of speech (词性), the Chinese meaning and also how to use this word. But how can you know where the word is in thousands of English words? How to find it in a dictionary quickly.

First, all the English words are in the alphabetical order. In the dictionary you can first see the words beginning with the letter A, then B, C, D, E... that means, if there are two words “do” and “put”, “do” will be certainly before “put”. Then if there are two words both beginning with the same letter, you may look at the second letter. Then the third, the fourth . . for example, “pat” is before “picture”, “bald” is before “balloon”.

Do you understand how to look up a word in a dictionary?

The dictionary will be your good friend, and we can learn better from it. I hope you’ll use it as often as possible in your English learning.

The food in America is different from our Chinese food. For example, they eat a lot potatoes. They like to eat them every day. They eat bread for breakfast and for another meals. They eat their bread with butter (黄油), maybe cheese or jam (果酱). Cheese and butter are made from (用……做成) milk. They drink a lot of milk, too. They drink the milk in hot or cold, and they put it in their tea. And they like meat or fish with potatoes and other vegetables. After the meal, they always have something sweet. They call that dessert (甜点).

Liu Yan is a teacher in a middle school.     36     Her son’s name is Wang Hao. He is thirteen. Her daughter’s name is Wang Rui. She is only seven. Today is September 10th.     37     It’s Teachers’ Day, too.

In the morning, Liu Yan, her daughter and her son go to a store and buy some things. Liu Yan buys a red skirt and a big birthday cake (蛋糕) for her daughter.     38     What about her son? He buys a watch for his mother.

    39     Her students come to the party. They say “Happy birthday!” to Wang Rui and say “Happy Teachers’ Day!” to Liu Yan.     40    

After that, Liu Yan’s daughter gives the card she buys to her mother. It says “Thanks, Mom Happy Teachers’ Day to you!” When Liu Yan sees the card, she is very happy.