Angoltanár és osztálykísérő vagyok a Tüskevárban. 2016 óta foglalkozom különleges figyelmet igénylő gyermekekkel ebben az iskolában. További végzettségeim: a magyar mint idegen nyelv tanára és gyógypedagógiai asszisztens. Emellett gitározom, zene szakkört vezetek, blogolok és filmezem. 2011-ben létrehoztam a TAKE FIVE angol társalkodó klubot. 2021 és 23 között az OktaTáska Podcast szerkesztő-műsorvezetője voltam.
On June 22 we gathered for the opening session of the summer season. As always, we prefer to leave our headquarters in the summer to catch some sunlight. This year we contacted Magvető Café, and booked a few tables to try out how a TAKE FIVE meeting would go there. As you can see in the photos, the extraordinary summery club atmosphere was present, and hopefully it will remain for the rest of the season. The next session will be on July 6. Take a look at the photo gallery below to get rid of your uncertainties about whether you want to join us next time.
Ladies and Gentlemen, let us present to you the first TAKE FIVE Junior organizer.
The meeting has already begun. We are waiting for everyone to arrive.
There isn’t anything better than a cold refreshing lemonade around 6 o’clock.
The enthusiastic visitors have conquered the podium, and they are reading today’s special summer topic.
Zoli got lost, but Balázs ran after him to show him the way. In this photo, he is showing Balázs how close he was to the café.
Another younger sister can be spotted in the photo.
We are experimenting with an improvisational story-telling game. The pairs pass around their stories after having written a few sentences.
She asked us if she could handle the bell for the rest of the game. Of course!
I am strolling down memory lane – taking it slow because there are too many places to stop at. In 2011, we started out in a room overflowing with all the five people and a few packets of salty sticks. We had absolutely no idea how it was going to be. Today we host meetings with fifteen to twenty guests in a nice bar where the backmost room is reserved for us. After months and years of painful struggle, the club began to live a life of its own. Besides the loyal hard core, it has been a true honor to welcome an enormous group of newcomers recently. One of my favorite stories is a guy who told us that he had taken a flyer half a year before so that he could visit us one day. And there he was.
After long weeks of silence, allow me to give you an overview of how we spent our final session in 2016, and also share a few secrets with you about the covert affairs of the club.
Christmas time
On December 15th we brought back the genuine TAKE FIVE Christmas spirit, like we always do. We began with a few rounds of word chain to get the Christmas bulb rolling. Instead of the regular envelopes, we pulled off a prank on the unsuspecting guests. I stood up and said: “We are having a little technical problem because we forgot to bring the envelopes, but…” We had hidden a tiny slip of paper under the top of each mushroom on the tables. They found out the secret quite quickly. On the slips there was a list of questions related to how we celebrate or what we think about Christmas.
There were no speakers on the stage this time since we did not intend to spark any debate on the topic. Instead, Balázs asked questions like “What is the worst present you’ve ever received?” or “What was your most awkward Christmas moment?” It was incredibly amusing. I finally had a chance to share a couple of childhood traumas, including a disgusting Santa Claus toy that started playing some dreadful music when you approached it. The bullies in elementary school were nowhere near the experience – although as far as the Santa toy is concerned, we were able to lock it up in the chamber, as opposed to the former.
One of the best shots turned out to be our fairly new invention, the Alternative Universes, combined with the Christmas theme. As Woody Allen would say, “I am flabbergasted” by the level of creativity and ingenuity of our guests. Did you know that in the Animal Universe, animals eat roasted politicians on Christmas Eve? The pinnacle of this game was a Jingle Bells song with alternative lyrics sung by the citizens of the Superhero Universe. Sing along:
Smashing through the snow
In a one-horse open plane
All the skies we go
Flying all the way
Bells on Batman’s ears
Making heroes laugh
Oh what fun it is to fly with Santa Claus tonight
Spider webs, spider webs
Shining all the way
Oh what fun it is tonight in an invisible plane
Laser eyes, glowing capes
Soaring all the way
Oh what fun it is to wear your Christmas underwear…
…on the outside.
The main attraction of the night was the all-time favorite, the ever-green classic (labels we arbitrarily stigmatized the game with): the Christmas Taboo, which means forty-eight Taboo cards that we created ourselves. The cards contain words that are connected to Christmas or winter in general. We never play this game with teams. We just sit around the table as one big group, and it’s free for all. As the ultimate motivating factor, we promised a handful of szaloncukor for the winner – which we later regretted. (Contrary to popular belief, there is no proper translation for szaloncukor as it is a Hungarikum solely produced in Hungary and Slovakia.)
After Orsi had won the game by a landslide, she presented us with an offer. She would give away all her candies if we poured the entire content of the two bags onto her. It would have been hard to resist. Here’s the evidence:
What you didn’t know about…
You may still remember that our club once organized an extraordinary session for a group of high school students. We decided to revisit this brand new tradition at the beginning of December. I had an opportunity to meet a lovely group of eighth graders during my first teaching practice in the fall semester. I truly enjoyed all the time we spent together, and I felt by the end that I was not yet ready to let them go. I went back one day and invited them to a special TAKE FIVE meeting organized exclusively for them. They looked a bit puzzled first, needless to say, but on the 7th of December – the first Wednesday in the history of our club – ten of my students showed up (and went straight into the darts room).
The story did not end there. On the 15th, two guys came back to see a regular meeting of ours. They said they would join us for future sessions as well, and that they would try to drag some more classmates along. I am looking forward to seeing them, for a number of reasons.
The show must go on
The club is scheduled to reopen its gates on February 2nd. Our plan is to keep the well-known and well-working TAKE FIVE atmosphere with a format very similar to what you have seen before. My only proposal at this point is to make it slightly more flexible, and maybe broaden our horizons by experimenting with new things. You are welcome to assist us along the way. Feel free to send us feedback on any aspects the club, new activities to try out, not to mention topic recommendations.
Keep an eye out for the first Facebook event of February.
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow us to present to you a fine selection of the professional photographs taken at a special event celebrating the 5th birthday of the TAKE FIVE – English Language Club. All the credits go to Szilvia Liska.
On 19 May the TAKE FIVE club passed another milestone on the freeway of its five-year history. We had the immense pleasure and honor of welcoming 10 first-year secondary school students to an extraordinary one-off session. In collaboration with their English teacher we paddled into uncharted waters to discover and embrace a long-dormant possibility of our club.
“Hi there, Take Five organizers! I’m Svoboda Róbert, English teacher from Budapest. Balázs knows me…” That’s how it all began. We agreed that a regular session would be deep water for the students with all the strangers (not to mention the psychological trauma Balázs is likely to cause with his mere appearance), so we put our heads together and decided to organize a one-time special event, elegantly squeezed in between two scheduled meetings. Our goal was to keep the original, academically acclaimed and at the same time world famous TAKE FIVE format, but adjust everything to the proficiency level and age group.
One speaker from each group summarized their discussion in a few sentences. On the tables you can see our newly-acquired mushrooms that the groups can turn on once they finish.
Robi was brave enough to join one of the preceding events to sit down with us and help us lay down the foundations. In harmonious cooperation we imposed our brilliant ideas on him, which he tacitly and respectfully accepted. Our final plans included an ice-breaker, three of the topics we had already used at the club, and two amusing picture-based creative writing tasks. The session lasted for two hours with a ten-minute break.
Despite the fact that I am quite used to being surrounded by ladies, I was preparing for the event with a more or less healthy gender ratio in my mind. If you take a brief look at any of the photos, you may see how close I got. I think I will never be able to write down in a public blog how terrified I felt when I saw ten teenage girls walk into the club in a straight line. They all settled down and we dived right into the introduction part. One of our most favorite ice-breakers is a game called alphabet, in which we scatter the letters of the alphabet all over the floor. Then we ask questions and everyone has to find the starting letter of their answers. The girls became pretty excited upon hearing the questions “What’s your favorite band/singer?” and “What’s your favorite TV show?”. I turned out to be the only one who was having trouble coming up with answers and finding the letters.
Robi was giving us a helping hand.
Our lovely guests began to feel more and more comfortable as time passed. I would probably have burst out crying and/or run away if I had been taken to a club like this in the first year of secondary school. But to my astonishment, these girls made themselves feel at home by the end. They were ready to volunteer when it came to summarizing the topics, the room was often filled with laughter, and – as far as I could see – they did enjoy most of what we had prepared with. The session was concluded with a round of applause and a volley of thank-yous.
As the founder of the TAKE FIVE club and as an English teacher, I can confirm that this exceptional occasion was nothing but the first step. From now on we are looking forward to working together with other schools as well to provide more and more students with a genuine English-speaking setting where they have a chance to put theory into practice.
March 17 was undoubtedly a noteworthy day this year. We organized the fourth TAKE FIVE session of the spring season. Oh, and Saint Patrick’s Day happens to have fallen on the very same Thursday. For this negligible reason we decided to go off the weather-beaten track and invite our visitors to celebrate this special day with us. We also had the honor to welcome an extraordinary guest.
We took off with the following introductory question: what would you be a patron saint of? Then, instead of reaching for the color envelopes, we continued with a nice Saint Patrick’s Day quiz compiled by Era. It contained twelve questions carefully arranged in order of difficulty. We had the wonderful plan of showing the questions on the big screen using a PPT. As the saying goes: man proposes, CD-FŰ disposes. The TV had been moved to the other room for the darts players. Mastering your ability to improvise is among the perks of being a club organizer. We ended up reading out the questions one by one. In each round the members of the three small groups had to put their heads together and find the answer in one-two minutes.
The two organizers on the left are immersed in a riveting debate on how many beers they were going to order in the break. They even wrote it down just to be on the safe side.
We concluded this exciting show with two extra questions, one of which was “How many million pints of Guinness are consumed world-wide on St. Patrick’s Day?” (The astounding answer is 13 million pints.) The extra questions served as a smooth and almost unnoticeable transition to the topic of the day. The credit for the description goes to Balázs.
IT’S SAINT PADDY’S, HAVE A PINT!
Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated all around the world. Not only is it celebrated, people celebrate it in fashion – mostly dressing up in green and getting severely drunk. This happens more than enough at other occasions as well, but on Saint Patrick’s Day it is definitely encouraged. Do you think that it is wrong to encourage drinking on a society level because it maximises peer pressure, or it doesn’t matter because anyone can say no whenever they want to? Do you think that peer pressure is harmful in general? Have you ever done something out of peer pressure – because everyone else was doing it?
The questions of social drinking and peer pressure planted the seeds for an insightful discussion, which was later crowned by the four speakers on the podium. After they had presented their thoughts on the matter, the conversation shifted from the original topic to social media – whether creating a Facebook account could also be the result of peer pressure today.
Before the break, Era and I read out the trivia questions again with the correct answers, and announced the winner group. As a prize each member of the group could choose one thing from the menu for free.
However hard we tried, we didn’t manage to withhold our creative power when it came to the game. We had previously made a list of all the patron saints the people had said as their answer to the introductory question. We started off by giving one patron saint from the list to each group. They were then asked to come up with a name and a brief history for their saints. Finally, one person from each group took the hot seat and read out their stories. The game turned out to be so successful that it became more and more difficult to breathe from the laughter as the speakers took turns. It was indeed the perfect way to end our Saint Patrick’s Day event.
English Club Crossover
As Mac Taylor and Horatio Caine from the two CSI series met occasionally in crossover episodes, a kind gentleman from another English club was among our guests that night. Balázs and I spent an hour talking with Gergő before saying goodnight. He told us that they had founded their club just recently, and we were invited to check it out in the near future. Their club is called Chatterbox Chat Club. (Click here to see their Facebook group.) We were delighted to receive lots of compliments from Gergő on our work.
As you know, you can always find our latest event on Facebook. Keep in mind that we are open to your topic recommendations. Feel free to contact us and tell us about your ideas.
TAKE FIVE — English Language Club 