Tuesday 10/11: Lesson Planning

I spent the morning reading a book that was lent to me by one of the English teachers (Claude) at the school. It has lots of ideas for teaching English to kids (games, activities, etc.), so I took notes and added some to my lesson plan for next week. At 11:30am, I went over to the school for the meeting with Claude and Virginie (the two English teachers). We spent about an hour or so discussing how to teach certain things, looking at materials, and finally deciding to follow the same order of lessons as the “Speak & Play” program that was lent to me by the other primary school. Since I am only teaching for one week before vacation, I will just practice “Hello! What is your name?” “My name is ___”—and I’ll teach a bit about Halloween and Oregon! Shouldn’t be too hard…

Today there was a strike in the schools (I’m not sure who exactly was striking), so there was no school lunch for the students. That meant that every single student had to go home to eat lunch. Yep, they all were either picked up (there were oodles of parents outside when I arrived at lunchtime) or they walked/biked home. Margot was at home for lunch, so when I came home from my meeting I hung out with her for a little while (until she had to go back to school at 1:30pm).

In the afternoon I prepared more for my classes (including cutting up the sheets of Halloween stickers into individual stickers). Online I searched for coloring pages for both Halloween and Oregon. I was very excited to find a site that had an Oregon coloring book—with a picture of the Benton County Courthouse to color!!

http://bluebook.state.or.us/kids/color/index.htm

I went back over to the school to pick up the class lists, so I could know how many students I would have. After typing them all into my computer, I find that I have 133 students at École des Arènes. I have another 32 or so at the other primary school. Luckily I brought 200 Halloween stickers…we’ll see how far the Halloween candy I brought will go…

Before dinner I was reading one of my favorite children’s book (I had originally brought it for my students, but it is so far beyond their language abilities!), “Ramona Forever.” I decided to go downstairs and be somewhat sociable by at least curling up in the living room to read. When I went down, I discovered Margot watching the TV show “Dr. Quinn”—a story about a woman doctor in a pioneer town. It was so funny to see all these pioneers talking in dubbed over French! I watched it with her until the news came on, then I went back to my book.

Dinner was a nice big salad and a tomato and cheese quiche. After dinner we all (including Margot—she was allowed to stay up late because there’s no school on Wednesdays) watched a French film called “LOL.” A lot of the movie is about a teenager, so—not surprisingly—there is plenty of slang used between the highschoolers. That was hard for me to understand, but I did pretty well overall!

Here's a link to more pictures: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2048859188365.2098239.1451010052&type=1&l=7cbce47f72