Teaching

Ok so my internet's kind of slow and it cuts out every two hours but it's free so I can't really complain. I've tried updating my blog a couple of times with pictures but the pictures always take aaaages and the internet cuts out before it's done. So here's a post with no pictures, and rather than trying to update about everything that's happened in the last 4 weeks (which is quite a lot!) I'll just rush up to date to the last two weeks and talk about what's probably the most interesting thing, the teaching.

I'm a 9 month assistant in primary schools and that means I'm effectively the English teacher. I have three schools in three little villages dotted around the Luberon, a Parc Naturel in the midst of Provencal France. As mentioned before I live in Avignon, so I have to get three different buses for each of my schools, and for two of my schools I actually have to get picked up from the bus stop and driven for 10 mins or so to the school itself. I've only been doing it for two weeks and it's okay really. I do spend a lot of time on the buses, probably around 5 hours per week, but the great thing is that I only have to work Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and Monday is really just a half day. Yup, I'm a slacker. It is hard work teaching the kids though, and I do spend a lot of time preparing- I get kids of every age and level, from the three year old babies who still have dummies to the 10 year olds getting set for college (a.k.a secondary school) next year.

For those unfamiliar with the French school system, it starts at 2 or 3 in what's called the Ecole Maternelle, which is really akin to nursery school or kindergarten. Here's the info off of wiki:

"The ages are divided into Grande section (GS: 5 year olds), Moyenne section (MS: 4 year olds), Petite section (PS: 3 year olds) and Toute petite section (TPS: 2 year olds). It is not comp2ulsory, yet almost 100% of children aged 3 to 5 attend."

I only teach maternelle kids in one school where there is just PS, MS and GS... but let me tell you, teaching 3 year olds is hard enough! They don't even really know French yet and I'm meant to give them English?! Even the 5 year olds were a tough crowd- I tried my self invented 'hello what's your name?' song which worked pretty well with the 6-7 year olds, but with the 5 year olds I just get blank stares. It's hard enough to elicit their name when I ask them in French! On the other hand when I showed the 3 year olds a picture of a dog one of them did tell me in French that his dog had just died... leaving me pretty speechless.

Anyway I only spend 1 hour a week with maternelle, so the other 11ish hours of my time is spent with those in ecole elementaire. In EE there are 5 levels:

CP: 6 year olds
CE1: 7 year olds
CE2: 8 year olds
CM1: 9 year olds
CM2: 10 year olds

At my schools the classes are mostly mixed, so for example I get CP/CE1 or CE1/CE2 or CE2/CM1... at all schools there is a separate CM2 class. There are 5 classes in each school, and in each school I get between 30 minutes and an hour per week with each class. As you can imagine, 30 minutes a week of English is not very much, but then again an hour is really too long for the kids to concentrate on English. Thankfully at the schools the teachers are all lovely and the directors especially are really helpful. In each school the teachers stay in the class while I teach, excepting some teachers who leave the class some of the time. The kids are all really cute, but they do (especially the older ones) tend to talk a lot and it's really difficult to control them if the teacher isn't there. I have some ideas for dealing with this in the future but so far I've just been overwhelmed with the planning and executing of lesson plans and haven't had time for a long-term discipline strategy.

This week my lessons were on halloween, and involved a mixture of different activities dependant on the level. For the younger kids I had a song about witches and a picture of a skeleton which we used for parts of the body, and after we sang 'head, shoulders, knees and toes'. For the middles, I also taught a few halloween words like 'witch, bat, cat' and then did halloween charades, followed by the skeleton, 'head shoulders knees and toes', then 'simon says' for the parts of the body. For the oldest, we did all the halloween words, the charades game, then some of them got a halloween wordsearch, then we used the skeleton for body parts, revised 'head shoulders knees and toes', then sang 'the hokey cokey', then for some of them I had a dinosaur skeleton worksheet to label, and for those who finished the worksheets early I also had a colouring in sheet which was to colour in the different body parts of halloween creatures (i.e. colour the spider's legs red!). For the first two schools I tried to mark their worksheets as I went along but it was really difficult to do and the pupils whose sheet I wasn't marking got rowdy, so in my third school I asked if I could take them home to mark and they said sure. So I did my first proper bit of marking and put stickers on the ones who got it all correct... I anticipate a bit of a nightmare when I give them back and those who got all but one correct see that they didn't get a sticker, but I had to draw the line somewhere. Also I noticed there are two or three in each class who are waaay behind the others and I'm trying to work out strategies to get them involved without making them feel victimised. Drawing a blank on that one at the moment, let me know if you have any ideas!

Well that's all for just now, it's the Vacances de Toussaint and no more school for nearly two weeks! I'm off to Paris on Sunday and back to Scotland next Thursday so it'll probably be pretty busy. Hope everyone else has a fun holiday!