Saturday, March 8, 2014

Es primavera

Monday, March 3rd

On Monday, I arrived home from Cádiz early in the morning and went to bed at 8 a.m. (I will blog about Cádiz soon..sorry) and I slept for a few hours. Once I got up, I did some laundry, went grocery shopping because I was out of everything. The rest of the day I pretty much just relaxed. I did some cleaning and homework and then at night, I went to my Spanish class and Karin joined me! It was a lot of fun and I liked having a friend in the class that I could joke around with. :) I think she is going to continue going, too, which will be fun!


Tuesday, March 4th

Tuesday was a school day and the 1st graders are learning about plants and animals still. I may have already mentioned this, but it's pretty easy for them right now, because they already learned animals in Science and now they are learning them in English. Anyway, one of the teachers was sick on Tuesday and I was so happy with how the students were. They did really well with a different teacher, so yay! By the way, here in Spain, there are no substitute teachers. Teachers from within the school sub for classes, so that can get pretty frustrating, but the students did great! :) Also, in the kindergarten class, the students made me put on a Queen of Hearts costume that their teacher wore for Carnaval the previous week and they got a huge kick out of that! Ha. After school, I had the language exchange with Esther, which went great and then I went home and relaxed for the night. Then, it was off to bed and ready for the next day.


Wednesday, March 5th

At school on Wednesday the students learned more about farm animals and baby animal names and then in Science they were reviewing the difference between deciduous and evergreen trees. Esther had me look up types of trees to teach them in English, so I gave them the good old typical trees off the top of my head: oak, maple, elm, evergreen, apple, and willow. Ha, then Esther had me add cypress because apparently there are a lot of those here in Spain. I wouldn't know, I don't pay attention to the types of trees too much. Then she asked me to teach them some types of forests. Like what would a forest with a bunch of pine trees be called? I had to look it up: Pine forest or Pinewood forest, but the other ones I really didn't know. Do we just put the type of tree name and then say forest? Oak forest? Maple forest? Ha, no clue. I do know that there is such a thing as a Redwood forest though, haha. Also, I think in general you can call them Hardwood forests, but I'm not positive. I decided that I call them woods. That's it, just woods. Woods are woods, right? And they are filled with a bunch of different types of trees, I think.

Anyway, the rest of the day was went really well. I read Beauty and the Beast to the kindergartners, started some more job applications at lunch, and went to my lessons after school. A few of them were cancelled so I only had to go to a few and they were a success. I taught the older sister how to use "though" and she understood and it was awesome! I told her to use it and impress her teacher, ha. I was honestly pretty proud of myself, too, for figuring out the proper usage of it and the rules..thank you, Google. :) After the lessons, I went home, did a little bit more application stuff, and then got the desire to watch It Takes Two on YouTube, because for some reason, it's there. Ha. If you don't know what movie that is, it's an old Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie. Anyway, after watching that wonderful movie. It was off to bed.


Thursday, March 6th

On Thursday, it was again farm animals and plants, then in the afternoon we had talleres, which are workshops. These workshops will be going on for the next several weeks every Thursday. What they are are just different workshops that the students get to do. I think there are three rotations total: drama, art, and science. Julia and I are helping with the drama workshop with the 2nd and 3rd graders because the play is in English. This first workshop was pretty fun because we haven't worked with the older students yet. The only thing is that it is a locura (crazyness, frenzy). We only have two workshops with each group before they rotate. So in this first one, we had to act out the play for them, make their costumes, and give them their scripts. Then, this coming week, they have to perform the play and we have to tape it. Only problem is that we didn't finish all of the costumes last week, so we have to finish them first and then perform the play. Should be interesting. We will see what happens. :) I'll let you know.

Anyway, after school, I had two lessons that both went pretty quickly. Also, I think I told you that one of the girls has two love birds that had two eggs hatch and that they were ugly two weeks ago, but this past week they actually had a lot of feathers. They grew a lot quickly. Haha, I'm sure you could careless though. Sorry. Anyway, once I was home I added Cádiz pictures on my Facebook and then I planned for the teacher's class on Friday. Also, since I mentioned Cádiz, I should tell you that I will be blogging about it soon. Hopefully, tomorrow or Monday. :)


Friday, March 7th

On the last day of the week, I went to Esther's P.E. class again and she wanted me to teach the whole class so that she could listen to everything I said. It put a little pressure on me, because I was trying to talk naturally, but also, I know that I don't speak perfect English, so I was worried about saying something that wasn't really grammatically correct, but oh well, the point is that I taught the class Red light, green light and duck, duck, goose and I think they loved them both! :) Esther wants me to keep teaching typical games that we play in the U.S. so anymore games that you can think of are welcome. I thought of Red Rover, but the class that I would be teaching it to is already pretty rough, so I don't want to encourage them to break through other students' arms. Ha.

Anyway, in English they did a quick workbook page on a country fair, what I would call a county fair, ha. And they learned the word tractor among others. If only they knew where I really came from. I have a lot of experience at county fairs. Ha. Anyway, I also just thought it was funny that the majority of the students colored their tractors red. I'm not sure if this is because of media or what, but I just thought it was funny. I didn't see any green tractors out there. Sorry, John Deere. You haven't reached Spain yet. Ha.

After classes with the students, I had a class with the teachers, which went pretty well, but I think I might have made it a little too difficult, but you live and you learn. In the spirit of it being Carnaval the past weekend, I decided to teach them about something cultural in the U.S. that is exactly along those lines: Mardi Gras. It went pretty well, but I did run into some problems. Like the word one when used in a sentence like this: Which one is blue? I have since figured out that it is a pronoun in this sentence, but when someone asks me what it means and why it is used and why it is "is" and not "are" and how is it different from the Dolce and Gabbana commercial that says "The One"..it really throws me for a loop. I just looked up the uses of "one" in English..there are like four uses..gah. Anyway, long story short, I used to want to get ESL certified and now I just don't know. I don't actually enjoy teaching English. lol I mean, I know that is why I am here, but my real passion is Spanish, now that's a language I can get behind. And honestly, I don't think I would ever actually turn down getting ESL certified, but yea, it's definitely not on my list of top things to do right now. Also, I don't mind teaching the students English, because a lot of the time it's just vocabulary and I love teaching them Science, but it's the grammar that I despise.

Anyway, after school, I went home and ate lunch and then went on a short run with Karin! I guess I should mention that it has been absolutely beautiful this week! It has been in the upper 50s or lower 60s and it's definitely starting to be Spring and I am LOVING every second of it! After the run, Karin and I hung out and ordered pizza, which was pretty good and completely cancelled out our run and then Stephanie joined us to discuss our trip to Germany in May. We bought our plane tickets so that's another thing out of the way. Yay. :) And I am pretty pumped to go to Germany and I am excited that Karin will be showing us around where she studied for five months. After the girls left, I had every intention of going to bed, but one thing led to another and I stayed up super late Skyping my boyfriend and our mutual friends. And although, the exhaustion is starting to get to me right now, I wouldn't take it back, it was great talking to and seeing them all. I hope you all had fantastic weeks and I hope your weather is starting to warm up for you!

Also, don't forget to spring forward tonight. My clock doesn't change for another few weeks though.


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