Teaching Week 15: Old MacDonald Had a Farm...

So this week, the majority of my lessons revolved around the song, “Old MacDonald.” I taught kids of various ages the names of the farm animals as well as their sounds in english. The difficulty levels of the activities varied with the age of the students. For the very young ones (5-6) I showed them flashcards and wrote the sounds on the board and had them repeat after me. Then, they learned the song through lots of repetition. With the slightly older kids (7-9), I added on a worksheet where they had to match the sound and picture of the animal. They also had to write the animals name next to each picture. For the oldest kids (10-11). They had some partner activities in addition to learning the song. They each received some riddles that described the animals, and their partners had to guess which animal was being described. The riddles were simple and helped review colors and parts of the body, which we talked about earlier on in the year. Then, each partner received a different set of pictures of farm animals and they had to describe their pictures to their partners. For example, one student had one cow in their picture while the other student had two. Then, I had pairs come up and present in front of the class.

Funny side notes: When talking about the animals, all of them knew the word duck already, because of "Donald Duck." I am guessing that he is pretty famous here among the children. Also, they had problems with the word "sheep." Every time they said it they would giggle because it sounds a lot like they are saying "chips" in French. And as soon as I said, Old MacDonald, they all started laughing and talking about McDonald's... haha. Never a dull moment with these kids :).

Other little lessons I taught this week were pretty random, but they were a nice break from “Old MacDonald.” In one of my Tuesday classes, I presented a Powerpoint on San Francisco. I showed them pictures and I even played them a music video of the song, San Francisco by PH Electro, because it does a good job of really showing off the city. After this presentation, the kids were asking when they could start packing their suitcases, haha. On Wednesday, I had two small groups of four kids from my 3rd class. Usually, this class as a whole is a little hard to handle, but in small groups they were great! I have never seen them so focused! We played Guess Who, and afterwards, the kids told me that they really had fun! 

On Tuesday night, I had my adult english class. We started off by a grammar sheet as usual, and then finished talking about the Friends lesson from last week. Next, I told them about the movie, The Wizard of Oz, and I showed them the trailer. Then, we started to just zoom in on the song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, and I had them watch the clip from the movie. After watching it once, I had them fill in missing lyrics while watching it a second time. Then, I played them the same clip but with subtitles so they could check their work. Once they had everything filled in, we discussed the song and what we thought it was about. Next, I talked about covers of songs, and played them IZ’s version of the song. We compared the two and talked about which we preferred and why. During this discussion, the adults taught me two french words: cul cul (which I think means wishy-washy/ludicrous) and niais (which means simple, naive.) I had to look them up on word reference, because I had not heard these words before. At the end of class, we discussed Valentine’s Day and how the US celebrates it versus how France celebrates it. Apparently it is not that big of a deal here in France, especially at the elementary schools. The kids don’t bring cards, candy, and treats for teachers or their classmates. The adults told me that in France, couples might go out to eat at a restaurant, or the guy might buy the girl some flowers. They said it’s not very common to give chocolate to each other or other gifts. For most people in France, Valentine's Day seems to be just like any other normal day. It's very interesting to have these cultural difference talks with French people and I hope I can have more of them with my adults. 

Random highlights from my week:

The Tuesday lunch at the high school had to be one of my favorites ever! I just really enjoyed it all, even though I wasn’t even quite sure what I was eating. I think the main dish was a sausage type thing. 

yum

On Wednesday, it was one of the teacher’s birthday, so she brought Mars bars for her students and she gave me one as well! It was solo good! It was like a milky way but with caramel added.

On the way back home from work Thursday, I saw a really nice rainbow! It was probably one of the fullest rainbows that I have ever seen; it was really a full arch.

Rainbow over la Loire

On Thursday night, Kate, Jack, Camilo’s girlfriend, and I went to this free french rock concert at a youth center. We were hoping to meet some younger french people and we wanted to check out the music. The group was called La Jarry. We were not expecting it to be very good, but we were pleasantly surprised! The group wasn’t half bad. There was a variety of ages there, and some of the older people were having the best time lol. They were dancing and one lady even knew all of the words to their songs.

La Jarry

Enjoyed another good week here in Roanne,

Magdalena