I have finished my third week teaching here in the Basque Country! I am becoming more and more comfortable in the classrooms with my teachers and students. This week has been packed full of new experiences and I'm loving every minute of it.
Before I get started, I noticed this poster in my classroom. I thought it was very cool because we were talking about verb tenses back in my classroom at OH Stowe before I left! I thought this was a very cool connection!
On Monday, I got to experience an English lesson! It was an impromptu re-teaching lesson on ordinal numbers. The students were struggling to write the date for February 13th. They were thinking it was 13rd. My teacher, Laura, took this chance to go over ordinal numbers again. They did a few together and talked about when to use each ending (th, st, nd, rd). Then the students practiced on their own to make sure they understood completely.
They spent almost the whole class going over the ordinal numbers. For the end of class, we talked about my Flat Stanley. We had talked about it before, but now my teacher wanted them to make their own! They took the rest of the class to make their Flat Stanleys. The next time I see this group of kids, we will start reading the Flat Stanley book. It is actually really cool and relevant because the students are learning about cartoons right now. They get to use this character to learn a little bit more about me and cartoons at the same time. Here they are working on their Flat Stanleys.
Then, after class, Laura asked me to help her make a practice sheet for question words for her students. This was the first time I got to help with curriculum and planning in English! It was really fun to be able to share my knowledge with her by creating tools for her classroom.
Another interesting "first" I had on Monday was getting to see a test! I watched the Primary 6 students take a test on the different systems of the body. They had to memorize the information in Spanish and then write it down for the test. I asked why it was in Spanish and the teachers said just because there is more information about the human body in Spanish than there is in Basque. I also asked about the testing since the school doesn't test in the younger grades that I have seen. The teachers told me that they test in Primary 6 since they go to high school next year. High school for them will be very different than their primary school right now where they learn through projects and topics. The tests help them prepare for learning in high school which is really cool that they help the students like that.
On Tuesday, the biggest shock for me was that there was no mention of Valentine's Day. In the US, there are all these parties and time to appreciate the ones we love. In school, we didn't even mention Valentine's Day - the day was just a normal day. I worked with the 5 year old class today while they worked on putting numbers in order, Then later, they worked with their story book "Knock, Knock" again. They worked on creating their own little booklets. This took a lot of time and attention for them to create their booklets.
On Wednesday, we talked about the candy topic. We worked on creating a world map with all of the popular candies around the world. It was a very cool way for them to learn about the world in relation to candy, a topic that interested them. I also went to a planning meeting today about candy. They talked about the math component of candy in which they will measure and compare how much sugar is in different candies. It was very shocking to see how much sugar is actually in candy!
Tomorrow (Thursday), we are off to BARCELONA! I'm really excited to see Barcelona and experience the beauty there.
Agur for now, Ms. Peachy
