You don’t have to feel terrible all the time on school days. Your school days can be some of your happiest time! Yes, it is possible. Let me tell you what you should do.

On every weekend, take a piece of paper and write down the title “My Schedule (计划)”. Under it, write the days of the week. Next to the days you can write what you should do. You should give yourself enough time for study and some time for activities you like to do.

In class, you have to listen to the teachers carefully. Also, try to answer the questions they ask in class and talk about your ideas. You will be someone interesting for the teachers and someone special for your classmates.

Try to make friends with your classmates. If they don’t like to make friends with you, it’s fine. Notice if there is someone whom you feel you can be friends with.

If you want to do something or you feel bad these days, you can discuss it with the friend you trust. It is very helpful to have a best friend who can reach for your hand and touch your heart.

Invite your friends to ask them if they’d like to hang out with you. Other time, do homework with them at the same time or places. You could give them ideas and they may have helpful thoughts that would help both of you.

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” 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.