Thursday, January 26, 2012

Tuesday 1/24: School Lunch and Long Talks

For some reason I couldn’t sleep last night…I think I might have been feverish? So it was lucky that I didn’t have an early class today. I headed over to teach at 10:45am and the class was really talkative, which is just tiring. We talked about feelings today (with the 8 yr olds) and learned “How are you?” “I’m ____.” It’s funny because they are so used to saying “How OLD are you?” that they often mistakenly say that instead! I had made them a feelings wordsearch, so they spent the last 15 minutes of class doing that, which was a good break for me.

Two of the teachers who normally eat lunch from the cafeteria were leaving for lunch today, so they invited Pablo and I to have their lunch. So, I ate “school lunch” for the first time. Hmm. Well, it’s definitely healthier than in the US, but it wasn’t very good. The entrée was a bizarre bean/egg/mayo salad that I only just tasted, then the main course was balls of meat and a squash puree that was way too salty, and then there was bread (not amazing) and cheese, and a choice of either an apple or clementine. I only ate a little puree and then had bread, cheese, and two apples. Oh well, at least not all the food went to waste!

After lunch I taught the little kids in the library and that went well! We briefly reviewed the colors and then started learning the days of the week. I had printed out the names of the days of the week and I had 7 students each take one and go to the front of the class. Then the remaining students had to put the days in the correct order. They have the most difficulty with Tuesday and Thursday because they can’t really see a difference…perhaps because in French, “th” is pronounced like “t” so they seem to be basically the same word!

From there I went up to the class of 10 year olds, where we reviewed the animals and sang “Old MacDonald Had A Farm.” I didn’t try the dance this time, though, because there’s not enough room in their classroom. :p

I had a little break (during which I went home and lied in bed for 30 minutes) then I taught the other class of 7 year olds. We worked on the days of the week as well and then they had time to start a color-by-letter. I had to go around correcting those that thought “R” (red) was for some reason…the color green. Most of them got it right, though!

When I came home, I had tea with Margot and *finally got to skype with Maria (I’ve been wondering what was going on with her because I hadn’t heard from her since last Thursday night…and normally she’s online every day. Apparently she ran out of internet and hadn’t been able to get more) before I had to leave for my conversation class.

We had a good time speaking in English and discussing the differences between American schools, British schools, and French schools. They asked a bunch of questions and some I could answer, others I couldn’t…like, who pays for the schools? The city? The county? The state? And who pays the teachers? In France the town pays for the elementary school, the county pays for the middle school, and the region pays for the high school (I think)… It seems a bit confusing.

After dinner tonight, Margot, Catherine, and I watched the TV show about a foster family. It plays every Tuesday night, so I watch it with them. I’ve been watching a lot less TV lately because I just come upstairs after dinner and either hang out a little bit with Margot, or read/lesson plan/go on my computer in my room. It’s been nice, though, because lately we haven’t been watching the news during dinner, which I LOVE!! Hopefully this’ll last! I much prefer talking about whatever subject just happens to come up!

After the TV program tonight, Margot headed to bed and Catherine and I started chatting. We had a really good talk about several different subjects and when we happened to glance at the time, it was 2:15am! Holy cow! I had no idea it was that late!! Neither of us thought it was even past midnight. But, it was great to have a long talk and luckily we both can sleep in tomorrow morning!

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