I have now taught in all but 2 of the classes I am supposed to (one class's teacher was on strike on Tuesday along with a lot of France and another was the victim of an error on the timetable I was sent). Having now spent approximately 10 hours in the classroom with kids between the ages of 5 and 10 I can safely say I love my job. It's not just the cute kids (oh but some of them are just presh), but the way they're excited by learning things. At 12 I was definitely not excited about French lessons, but these children really enjoy the novelty of learning another language. Let's hope it lasts...
So far I've been doing the same exercises with most classes - Hello, Where Are You From?, What's Your Name?- but expanding with the older classes into things like colours, school objects (rulers, pencils, bags etc), parts of the body, questions (how many, which one, where is etc.) and time and date. I've also been given the task of trying to find some things about Halloween to show most of my classes this week coming (it's not really celebrated in France) so I'm trying to find things that are fun for the kids but not too scary! ESL websites are rife, luckily, most with downloadable flashcards. One or two of the classes use a coursebook called I-SPY where the main characters are monsters anyway, so they should be pretty much unfazed:
Going back the "absolutely precious" subject, here are some things I was given this week:
The flag was given to me by a girl in one of my CE2 classes (age 7-8) on Monday as a welcome present, and on Friday a little girl in the same class came up to me after lunch and gave me the drawing of the flowers. It's got my name on the back and everything.
This afternoon, a Sunday, I finally did my bike trip up to Camon. On Wednesday I found that my cold of the previous week had come back for seconds, no doubt helped by a little too much to drink the previous night, so I thought it would be wiser to wait. It only took me 18 minutes to reach my first school from the Gare du Nord, 8 between schools (including getting-lost time) and 20 to get back to the station from the second school. M. Hoppy is going to make that €10 a month go far!
how long are the lessons? i spy's good but pretty sparse, there usually isn't enough to fill a whole lesson. spelling games are a charm - draw a staircase with a man at the top and a monster of your choice at the bottom on the board, each time they get a letter wrong the man drops down a step until he gets eaten. get them to stand on their chairs, draw several rafts floating on a sea with stick figures representing each child and three or four barrels under each raft; each time one gets a letter wrong, they lose a barrel, until they have none left and their raft capsizes. then there's always hangman, and luckily kids don't tend to realise that these games are all essentially the same, so you can alternate if they get bored. they also love playing pairs/memory with the password flashcards, and musical chairs without music (ie. "walk around the chairs", "hop around the chairs", "crawl around the chairs", "SIT DOWN!"). my top tip - www.puzzlemaker.com. put a wordsearch in front of a seven year old and they will sit there for half an hour without any complaints. glad you're having fun, long may it continue! x
ReplyDeleteOoo John how exciting to hear from you :)
ReplyDeleteThe lessons here are 45 minutes, so it really depends how structured they are as to if they zoom or drag (mostly they zoom).
Spelling games don't work for most of my classes because until they're in CE2 (8-9) they don't write in English, only learn to speak it.
but i am LOVING the amount of free flashcards I can get from ESL websites ^_^ xx