It went really well. Classes did anyway. I am at the school 3 days a week with so many classes. Each grade is big enough for 2 classes. I teach 1st-6th grade. The classes are 30 minutes each. 4th-6th grade have 2 classes each week. So that is 9 hours of English lessons a week at the school. On Tuesdays and Fridays I have classes with the staff and teachers. 2 hours a week for each of those groups and the teachers are divided into 2 classes. As well as 1½ hours with some of the interpreters who work with the groups when we have them. That is a lot of planning! And for the first week I’ll have to admit I didn’t do a whole lot of planning. The other confusing thing about my schedule is that not all of the grade classes are back to back. If I have the 6th grade A class on Monday it doesn’t mean that I also have the B class (which would be the same plan) but that might happen on Wednesday along with the A classes second session for the week. But I think it is going to work out. All week I got the new class jitters—what if I screw up, do a bad job, blank, I don’t know, but that didn’t really happen.
The 4th-6th grades have been studying some French all year with Wahite Frick (pronounced Wyfrik) who had worked with the Canadian English teacher who used to be here. The 1st-3rd grades were new additions…so for the 1st-3rd grades we sang ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ with key words being star, diamond and sky…it came out sounding like “twinkle twinkle twinkle STAR” with the motions that we used in Malawi and a few extras that I threw in. Next came ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’. A huge hit as I heard it all around school all week though I don’t know that they really took in the names of the body parts. In 4th-6th I introduced myself very briefly and then had them ask me questions. I could tell they had just learned about family relationships as I was asked ‘how many cousins, aunts, uncles, grandpas and grandmas I had as well as their names. I was even asked if I had a brother-in-law. Well what his name was…my age, if I was married, if I have kids, etc. Then we just did some vocab that I had on me—classroom objects.
The coming week is for Christmas carols…it will be more singing than I think I’ve done in a very long time!
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