The homestay (寄宿家庭) provides English language students with the good chance to speak English outside the classroom and the experience of being part of an American home.

What to Expect

    The host will provide places to live and meals. Rooms will be cleaned every day. And the host is there to offer help and advice on your physical and mental (精神的) health.

Living Area

    Host families are mainly in Zones 2, 3 and 4. Most hosts don't live in Zone 1 because much of central New York is trading centre. Zones 3 and 4 often offer larger houses in uncrowded areas. But it's very convenient to travel to the centre of New York by subway.

Meal Plans

    It's important to know that few American families still provide a traditional cooked breakfast. Your breakfast mainly includes fruit juice, bread and coffee. Cheese, fruit and cold meat are not part of the breakfast. Dinners are usually made up of meat or fish with vegetables followed by dessert, fruit and coffee.

Friends

    If you want to invite a friend to visit you, you must ask your host for permission first, because some families feel uncomfortable when there are strangers at their home.

Oxford（牛津）is a city in the UK. It's in the west of the UK and it's famous for the University of Oxford. It's an old university—about 900 years old. It has a longer history than Cambridge（剑桥）University, It's the oldest university in English-speaking world.

    There are about 20, 000 students and they are from all over the world. Many students go to school by bike. There are 31 colleges（学院）in the University of Oxford, but Cambridge University has only 31 colleges（学院）. There are 104 libraries in the University of Oxford. Stephen Hawking was a student of the University of Oxford. He's a great scientist. Clinton（克林顿）, the 42nd American president was also a student of the University.

    Music and Art will enter the Entrance Exam for the high school in Jiangsu. Without music, life would be a mistake. Music is a big part of our lives. But in recent years, some US schools have cut music classes to control budgets (预算).

    For example, Chicago public schools hurt arts education when it fired (解雇) over 1,000 teachers. Among them, 10 percent of the teachers taught art or music, according to The Washington Times. In fact, this is not just a problem in the US. In other countries, such as China and the UK, music classes are not thought to be as important as ones like science, math and history. That's partly because music is not seen as a very important life skill, and it isn't tested. Many students are busy with schoolwork, so parents and students choose to focus on subjects that are tested more often.

    However, learning music is beneficial (有益的) in many ways.

    When playing music, you need different abilities to work together. It is not as simple as it looks, according to Kenneth Guilmartin of Music Together, an early childhood music development program. For example, when playing the piano, people see music notes and decode (解码) them in their brains. They also use their fingers to make sounds. You need to deal with all these things at the same time.

    Music has a special connection with science as well. You can see that many scientists are good at playing music: Einstein played the violin, and German physicist Max Planck was talented in playing the piano.