School! [10th - 20th of Sept]

Right, so I need to condense 2 weeks into 1 post... CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

First day of school:

My thoughts: "Here I go...am shitting myself...what if they don't like me? What if I'm not meant to teach? What if they don't respect me at all, start drawing on the walls and shouting abuse at me!? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH"

How it  really went down: 

Deborah: "Hello everyone, this is Sabrina, she will be your assistant for the year, so you'll all be spending about an hour a day with her - if you do anything wrong, any swearing, talking out of place, being on the phone, etc... then you'll have to reply back to me, because she WILL tell me about it"

Me: "Thank GOD..." (Everyone laughs) *wave of relief washes over me*

Everything went pretty smoothly, went into the classroom that would now be mine for the next 9 months and love every inch of it, trying to make it my own as much as possible.
Following my mother's advice about and "ice breaker" lesson, everyone was very well behaved and wanted to know every excruciating detail of my life from where I'm from down to what my grand mother's birthday! - which I now know is the 9th of March 1922 (in case you wanted to know...)

My Classroom :)

They have a break every hour - which I needed at first for the amount of cigarettes I smoked in the first week! - and the students have seemed to take a liking to me as I try to spend time with them during those breaks (as well as with the teachers, lets not single anyone out here) and have invited me to go out with them to do a few things :)

The rest of the week was pretty much the same, with us playing games like Hangman, Sentence Races, Smash etc... and they have all really started to participate and are enjoy the lessons! A few are still playing on their phones or chatting in class but I have made it my mission to get everyone's undivided attention by the end of the year!!



Week 2:

Monday - Wednesday I struggled a bit, especially for the morning lessons. I had thought of 3 or 4 games to do with them in case any of the first ones failed to fill in the required time, and they all failed, leaving me feeling WORSE than I did the first day!!
Improvisation is not my strong point, so we spent most of the lessons playing Hangman and trying to have little conversations in English which always turned back into French... TEACHING FAIL!!!!

Today though made it all worth it. The students are now all waving or saying hello to me in the hallways, smiling as I go by. I know most of their names (although some I still have mind blanks on), a few of them I have already really connected with, they have been paying more attention and trying really hard to understand everything before I try to explain it in French.

We played a game called Stop the Bus - you have a table of different categories e.g. colours, animals, clothes etc.. I give them a letter from the alphabet and they have to find a word starting with that letter for each category. Now this game, I definitely recommend! I played it this morning with all of them, and they became more competitive than I have ever seen them so far. They were  interested, alert and desperately wanted to win! TEACHING WIN!!!!

[Side note - one of the students told me today that a lot of her friends have been telling each other that if they have English that day to ask to come with me as my lessons are really fun and I'm a lot more organised than last year's assistant - 2ND WIN OF THE WEEK :)]

Now that I've found a few games they really enjoy, I can focus on trying to find or make up some similar ones for them in the weeks to come and I now cannot wait to go back to school to see their little faces smiling up at me again :)


More to follow sooooooooooooon....

xx Chipmunk.