Jan 2008

So, the weekend. Rachel has been here, which is always cool. Just nice having someone round for a bit of company, and kinda makes me get out and do stuff a bit more. And of course Rachel is a wonderful person ha ha, particularly as she is such a neatfreak. I think the highlight of this weekend was waking up to find my bathroom mirror had been cleaned overnight. Yeah so she makes me feel like a bit of a dirty scumbag, but oh well...thats what friends are for!

Anyway so we have been looking at travelling plans. I really really want to do the South-East...I think Nice is going to be too far but I'd like to do Monpellier, Avignon etc at least at some point. However it looks like we will do Lille in Feburary which will be cool, and will defo try to get to Dunkerque at the same time, and may also involve more time in Paris or Disneyland. I love disneyland but am such a wuss with rides etc I'm not sure I'd be the best companion for hardcore Rachyrach but we shall see. Lille is only I think 5 hours...even though its completely other end of France its on the speedy TGV line so should be really cool I think. Oh and Eddie has found these chalets in Arcachon, which look really good fun for a group of us to do at Easter...and would work out supercheap (like 34EUR each for a week!) and could do Biarrtiz etc from there. As he pointed out if would be a nice grand finale for those of the group who are on 7 month contracts (all the Lycee assistants, Rachel, Lynn, Katie etc etc...). All sounds very cool.

Friday night we had people round here...I made aperitifs, yum yum. And then we went out for an all-you-can-eat Chinese, which was gooood (and the highlight of the night was randomly bumping into JP, our responsable, who we haven't seen since training...bisous all round. He's going to come and observe a lesson in Feb though...scarrry!). I wanted to go dancing, but in the end people just weren't feeling the Perigueux nightlife so it was back to mine for more of Lou's games. They are so silly but always lots of fun. We also played Chav Toptrumps...thank you George!

Saturday was a good day. Rachel and I slept in late, and then went for a pretty long walk along the Voie Verte which was really nice, and luckily the rain seems to be stopping, although the river was really high. We saw this random bohemian lady with 2 dogs and a rat on her shoulder....eugh. Also kinda got chased by a dog...ok not quite chased but still....it was lose and without owner and it ran towards us. We then had a brief fantasy about Boots MealDeal...mmmmmmmm, the 3 pack chicken sandwiches....mmmm...... so went and bought packs of sandwiches from Monoprix, very un-French but a nice change.

In the afternoon we did one of the guided tours of the town- Perigueux, Medieval-Renaissance. I've been meaning to do this for ages and it was really great. Learnt lots of stuff about the history of the place, the architecture etc, and he had lots of keys which let us into little secret places normally looked off to the public- the courtyard of the cathedral, the stairwell of a renaissance appartment and, best of all, the only remaining tower from the city walls which we got to go up. It wasn't massively high but just at rooftop level, and the old town looked so pretty from up there. Its amazing the little alleys and stuff we found...and lots of restaurants hidden away which I defo want to try out.

Today we got up and wandered into town, to the market for some Veg, to the papeterie for a paper and to the Mie Caline for a baguette....very nice, should make the effort more often to get up and out on a Sunday.

Now I really do have to start some lesson planning!!! Oops....

Oh and Muriel wants me to teach a pop or rock song to the children so they can do it in choir...any ideas?! help!

parce que ca fait pas de sens de dire que je suis "in Bordeaux"...je suis 1h30 de Bordeaux!

X

Me! A teacher! With Muriel's class CM1-CM2 (9-11 years) doing "Describing people"....hair, eyes etc etc...

(at this very moment in time I think I'm saying "Eugenie has got straight hair")

Muriel has put the photos on the blog and the children have written a little description:
http://ecoledavesne.cm1-cm2.over-blog.com/

Has been a pretty good week of teaching...the children have been a bit chatty at times, which is tiring. But have made a massive effort to use more English/less French and it seems to be working...it's amazing actually what they can understand and they pick up little things like "sorry", "good girl" and they will respond well if you say "Here finished?" etc. Also if one child is really not getting it, one of the others who has will eventually get frustrated and shout it ot in French, I tell him "We don't need a translation" and glare a bit but don't actually tell them off, because sometimes its actually useful and saves ME breaking the "no French" rule...but shhh!

Had a brilliant lesson today with CE1-CE2. Have introduced a scheme which I use EVERY lesson now with a sad face on the board and childrens name go under it. At the end we always play noughts and crosses/hangman or sing a song and if their name is up they don't get to play until I think they've been quiet for a long enough period of time for me to rub their name off. But anyway yeah so today we went shopping! I took in 3 shopping lists, little pictures of the fruits which were on the lists (and which we'd already learnt) and some 5, 10 and 20 pence pieces. The first time I distributed fruits to them and said "I'm going SHOPPING" (with big gesutres to myself, emphasis on SHOPPING which they understand and jangling my money. Then I said "Can I have ....an apple?". The child with an apple holds up their hand and I set up a little dialogue with them (all in English), hello, how much?, thank you etc, and give them the money. Repeated this several times so they all got the idea. Then split them into 3 teams (still all in English...), gave each team their shopping list of 4 fruits and some money and went through them with them having to do their shopping with me. Then a big "Oh you have 4 fruits! Well done!" to the team who did all their shopping first.

I was kinda nervous about doing this (these kids are very excitable and have only been doing English since end of Nov), but actually the amount of English I said and they fact they could add in little things like "Hello!" and "Thank you" which we haven't exactly learnt but which they know, really kept their attention and yeah it went really well.

S, the monster of the school, came up to me at the end and asked to look at the money, then she said
"Mais, ils ne sont pas francais!" I said "No, they're English", "English...mais quand tu vas dans les magasins tu utilises l'argent anglais?!". He he oh well, they had fun and learnt the names of fruits but I guess I still need to work on their "comprehension of other cultures and languages around the world" eh?!

Rachel is coming later, so hopefully we'll do something fun with the others tonight, and tomorrow we're going to do the tourist office tour of Peri and make some travelling plans.

Gonna hit the soldes for an hour or so now I think.

X

Ok so I was just marking books of CM2 and inside Marvin's was a postcard with a crocodile on it.

In the address bit was written-
1ere rang
3eme colonne
3eme table

And then...

Pour Victoria. Je t'aime de tout mon coeur. Tu est tros tros belle. Je t'aimorai toujours. Tu est mon coeur, a moi seul.

Soooo funny! Really really tempted to translate it all into English for him!

This afternoon I went to a village 'festival of tea', "Mixithe" with Sylvie, a teacher at my school, and two of her friends. The village itself, Plazac, is kind of interesting, described to me as "tres hippy" I would compare it to Totnes, Devon but it has a particular story= 588 inhabitants of between 15 and 20 different nationalities, meaning it is culturally very rich and much of its economy is based on the "artisinal". The weather was good to us today and the little buildings and paysage were really pretty. Firstly we went to a "Discussion au coin du feu. Le hammam : culture et tradition." So basically we went into this big old house/hotel which actually belonged to an English couple, they'd lit a big real fire inside and served us 3 different types of tea while we listened to a talk about "hammam" (turkish/Moroccon/Lebanese hot bath) (we later kinda randomly we ended up driving to this Turkish Bath place so the three of them could have a look around and we drunk some tea with the very-'Zen' people who work there!). Then we went to the main square of the village where there was a 'spectacle'...pretty fun, proper French village fete! They served tea, crepes and gateaux aux epices, a youth orchestra played, a local circus school performed and then a local group played Jewish music and people danced a bit. All very fun, here are some photos:

Today Sylvie introduced me to her friends and said I was very "gifted" in the way I was able to control the class, modify my lessons to suit etc withot any teacher training. It's always nice to have some positive feedback and yeah its all goodtimes. Been a good weekend for French experiences and compliments! I've been really lucky to have met these nice teachers.

Changing subject, if you haven't seen this http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7176424.stm yet, you really should. Whack. But I'll let you make up your own mind...