That's right... I'm back teaching! Today was my first day back after the break, although I was supposed to start again yesterday. My train in Nice got cancelled due to bad weather, however, and I couldn't get home until yesterday, far after when I was supposed to teach my class. Thankfully though the teacher was super understanding and not upset with me, which was great, because I was super nervous about going back today after be absent for three whole days. (I skipped Thursday and Friday to stay in Nice with my friends.)
Anyway, the order of business for the day was to use horoscopes to teach the children how to describe their personalities, something I thought was quite clever and fun. I had some teen magazines that I brought with my from the US that happened to have horoscopes in them, so I brought them along, although, as it turned out, I didn't really need them. The teacher gave me a piece of paper with instructions on how the students should get into pairs and practice having a dialogue about their horoscopes. I didn't realize that they already had some in their books, so I had everyone in the class tell me their signs and then had each sign's horoscope read out loud by someone in the class. It was pretty funny, actually, because, of course, they didn't know all the words, so I had to come up with some creative ways to rephrase what the horoscopes said. My favorite was teaching them what a crush is. Since I don't know the word for crush in French (I purposely didn't look words up before the lesson so that I might be able to break my habit of translating for the students) I had to explain what it meant in simple English. This is harder than you would think! Seriously, right now, pretend that you have to explain to someone what a crush is with a very limited vocabulary, and then pretend that it's a group of giggly middle schoolers. Yeah, not easy, but pretty entertaining. I ended up (after having failed a couple of times) using celebrities to describe crushes. Zac Efron, to be exact, because I figured the kids knew who he was, and there was a picture of him on the horoscope page, so I thought of him first. It was pretty funny and I think the kids enjoy my silly animated attempts to make them understand. I'm still not quite sure they got the concept, but I hope they did, and if not, at least I provided them with some entertainment for the day.
After giving the students a couple minutes to practice talking to each other about dialogues I had them stand in front of the class as do it. (As the teacher told me I should.) I was actually very impressed at how well they did, I only had to correct a few mispronunciations and a few sentence structures. (Not Ju-lee, July ect,)
I really enjoyed today, which was a great way to start back on the job. I only have one other hour of teaching this week to do, partially because Friday is another day off. It's slightly frustrating, but I think I'm going to ask to sit in on classes, and hopefully that will up my hours of not sitting at home on my computer. In fact, the observing I've done has already helped because today the teacher was able to tell me to do the assignment the way she had done during a class I sat in on. Hopefully more teachers will allow me to sit in and watch because I think I will learn a lot that way!
No comments:
Post a Comment