Well, I woke up at 5 am today to attempt to Skype with the fam. Attempt failed. But we did type chat for awhile, so it was worth it. I did my daily ritual of turning on the water heater light and went back to bed until 7.30. J Even got a run in and a relaxed morning before class at 9.30. I could definitely get used to getting rid of morning tutoring for the next month! We shall see….Besides that, today was so normal and routine that it seemed easy. With all our travels the past two weeks and the week prior to that we were running around visiting schools and the immigration office, so it’s been awhile since we have had a normal day.
Anyway, this week’s theme in ESL is the market. Food shopping that is. The ladies are actually pretty decent with this topic and communicating, so we are pushing them to speak in sentences and such. We went through words like cost, buy, purchase, total, receipt….all useful things. That’s definitely the bonus with doing topical weeks. Everything is immediately applicable and the ladies see that. With my higher level ladies we are about halfway through our novel on Mozambican/Portuguese/South African politics and murder. T’s reading group was laughing a lot during their reading session today (fi-fie-fo-fum was involved, how can you avoid laughing!) so I asked the ladies in my group if they were enjoying the book and they said yes, so that was encouraging. Yes, we don’t get to do fun story tales, but I think they enjoy that they are reading an adult book all in English about romance and murder, since books here are kind of a commodity. Parents don’t read to their children or tell oral stories, so I don’t think they have books around their houses. So reading is good. Hopefully they will continue after we leave. If they have access to books, that is.
Preschool was fun today. It’s always fun, but sometimes it gets frustrating because I was not there at the beginning of the year to solidify procedures and routines in their heads. But today anyone could plainly see that our methods and meticulously correcting things has paid off. Kids know they won’t get called on to go to the board unless their hands are up, their mouths are quiet, and they are in their seats. It’s taken awhile, but we’ve gotten to this point. J The pounding rain on the tin roof at the end of the lesson today did interrupt our flow, but we persevered. It did cancel our kickball game we had planned though…. L Hopefully Wednesday will be even better!
After lessons today, I planned lessons for tomorrow (tracing America, finding clipart pictures of food, and looking up famous American sights were all involved) before apartment searching (because yes, unfortunately, I need to find a place to live when I return to the States) and a bike ride before dinner. After dinner T and I started laying out what our first teacher training day is going to look like (thank you Teach like a Champion!) and listened to some comedians. We ended our night with the movie The Outsiders, which I brought along here since my kids from student teaching at home were reading it and coincidentally, T is having our two high school girls read the book here. So it was kind of educational, right? J
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