APRIL FOOL’S DAY

The first session of the Gabfest Club in April was dedicated to a complicated topic “Humor”. We have introduced it to observe the April Fool’s Day.
To start the ball rolling we described several funny pictures. This allowed us to engage quite a big number of new comers.
We watched several funny videos that illustrated the history of the April Fool’s Day and introduced new vocabulary. The foreign new comers – Egyptian students of local universities – told about the traditional pranks in their country. The Ukrainian club members explained what were the popular pranks in Ukraine. The club members shared stories about funny situations in real life.
The more complicated task for the group was to translate humor from one culture to another. We tried our skills in translating comments to Ukrainian caricatures and WWII satirical anti-Hitler posters. It was quite a challenge.
For a more relaxed conversation the WOA’s American volunteer Mr. Jason helped the club members and asked them questions about stereotypical jokes in Ukraine.
All the participants had fun and learned many new words.
Number of participants – 33 persons.
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Holidays with WOA

On October, 26-27th – 

Window on America center in Dnipropetrovsk was visited by a two groups of primary school students from school 141.

The Library staff told them about the resources available for them and the procedure for enrolling into the library.

The students study two foreign languages, one of them is English. The WOA staff member checked what American autumn holidays the children know about. It turned out they are well aware of the Halloween and Thanksgiving. The new topic for them was celebration of Columbus Day. Some kids even knew who Columbus was.

The groups were shown a number of animated cartoons including excerpt from the movie “Bamby”. While watching the movie the kids had to make a list of animals they saw and give their equivalents in English.

The session was educational for the kids and promoted library services to the primary school students.

Number of participants – 47 persons.

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The International Day of Friendship

Today’s session of the Gabfest Club (at Window on America center Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) was dedicated to the topic “The International Day of Friendship”. The United Nations (UN) observes this day since 2011 in order to promote the role that friendship plays in promoting peace in many cultures.
This year we focused our attention on the popular soviet term “The friendship of nations”. We tried to render the definition of this ideological principle into English and discussed the artifacts that symbolized this phenomenon in the Soviet times – the soviet order, one of the Moscow Universities, the “Nations’ Friendship” fountain at the Moscow Expo Center and “Nations’ Friendship” Arch in Kyiv. The tasks of describing these artifacts without preparation was very challenging, and only collective efforts of the group allowed us to work out acceptable descriptions.
 
The second part of the session was dedicated to a less complicated activity – we tried to describe and comment upon several editorial cartoons about the friendship between Russia and Ukraine. The group succeeded in explaining the symbolism of the cartoons in decent English. The bottom line of the discussion was – the reconciliation between the two nations will not happen soon.
The final part of the session was dedicated to the introductions of the new comers. The session caused heated debate and was quite educational for the younger generation.
Number of participants – 22 persons.

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