Teaching Week 20 and April Fool's Day!

On Monday evening, Kim cooked a yummy vegetable curry and her parents came over for dinner. I made dessert for the meal! I made Lemon Drizzle, thanks to a recipe from my friend Clare!

This cake took a bit of effort to make, but it turned out great! Here's the recipe: http://www.maryberry.co.uk/recipes/baking/lemon-drizzle-traybake

Lemon Drizzle

Tuesday was April 1st, or as we call it: April Fool’s Day! In France they call it: poisson d’avril! So, like in the US, people play pranks on each other, but here the kids usually try to tape fish on other peoples’ backs without them noticing. I had two fish on my back this morning, and the other teachers had a few as well, lol.

One of the fish the kids made

The bread from my favorite bakery had also got into the poisson d’avril with some special bread bags.

best baguette

Overall, this week, I reviewed how to describe physical features (hair, eyes, etc.) and continued teaching about the rooms of the house, and prepositions. One activity for reviewing prepositions and the rooms of the house that I did with the older kids was that I projected a picture of a house and placed a cat in various rooms (and had the students come up and do the same). The kids had to tell me which room that cat was in and if he was under/on/in/next to… some furniture in the house. The game went pretty well and the kids enjoyed it! 

Lunch at the high school is soo good! Look forward to it every Tuesday!

Veggies, chicken, chocolate beignet!

With the adults this week, I focused on past perfect (had + past participle of the main verb) vs. present perfect (has/have + past participle of the main verb) vs. past simple tenses in english.  It was a difficult thing to really explain because when you speak english fluently, you just use the correct one without really thinking about it. I ended up learning a lot in this lesson as well. By the end, I think most of the group understood when to use which tense, but sometimes it got a bit confusing, and sometimes I found myself even second guessing...lol.

On Wednesday night, Kim, Kate, Jack, and I went out to eat at Don Camilo’s, which is a really good italian restaurant here in Roanne. I had a calzone, which was filled with mushroom, ham, cheese, and even had a sunny side up egg inside. It was pretty tasty. For dessert, I had profiteroles! They were heavenly. Ice creamy, chocolatey…mmmmmm. 

profiteroles

After dinner, we went over to Jack’s place, where he directed this photo shoot of us assistants. It was quite entertaining, and we took some creative pictures.

On Wednesday, Kate and I had to deal with some flight drama, because we had booked flights a few weeks ago with Lufthansa to Vienna, but they decided to go on strike (from Wednesday to Friday) and as a result, our flight was canceled for Friday morning :(. We were a bit frustrated because we didn’t even receive an email notifying us of the cancellation… Luckily, one of Kate’s teacher’s told her that Lufthansa was on strike, because we had no idea! They ended up canceling a couple thousand flights. We called Lufthansa to try to get a flight change, but all of the friday flights were already booked for Vienna, but the Lufthansa guy managed to find us seats on a flight with Swiss Airlines that left Thursday evening! We booked it, and printed the tickets and all, but soon noticed that the guy made some errors regarding our names… he had accidentally put Mrs. instead of Ms. on our tickets, lol. We didn’t have time to call again, so we just printed our original proper name tickets as well as the new ones, and just hoped that we wouldn’t run into any trouble at the airport.

On Thursday, I said goodbye to Kim, she drove back to Germany with her parents in the morning. We had had a good time living together, and it was sad to see her go. One day, I am sure our paths with cross again :)!

On Thursday afternoon, I rushed back home, and took the train to Lyon, then the Rhone Express, then a plane to Vienna with Kate!

The post about Vienna is coming soon!

Magdalena