That said, let's first talk about Monday. Monday was our first day of school, although perhaps this is a slight exaggeration in that we really only were on school grounds in the morning. There was a 2 hour staff meeting, lead by the Principal and almost exclusively in Hungarian. It was pretty boring after the first half an hour but as Amanda and I are both well versed in the traditions of long meetings from which we will gain nothing we quickly put our minds to other tasks. I to outlining a rough syllabus so the grade three Nature Studies that I am teaching as of next week, and Amanda to writing down some rough ideas for an "Australia Day" that we have to put together for early next year. After the meeting we got down to work to putting some tools together for the classes later in the week.
Tuesday was basically centered on preparing the rooms, so it was a lot of cutting out and pasting and making posters. All and all pretty fun. At 4pm there was an official school opening ceremony. All the children and their parents arrived to listen to the Principal describe the new features of the 2010/2011 year (of which we were one), then the students put on a little play which although it was in Hungarian we are pretty sure that it was either about a student's first day at school, or about a ~1944 soviet reeducation camp. Either way, it was quite entertaining. The last feature of the night was that Amanda and I had to give a little speech, which was diligently translated by our good friend Ilona.
Wednesday was the first day of classes for the kids and it was exhausting. My god these little buggers have a lot of energy. We didn't actually lead any classes, but we assisted Ilona. There are 18 kids in grade one, 18 in grade two and only 8 in grade three. Trying the grasp the attention of 18 kids at once and get them to understand what the hell you are talking about is really a task to behold. My only tool at this stage is to look more ridiculous and interesting than anything else in the room. This is working to date but only the future will tell how ridiculous I will have to become.
Today was awesome fun because it was the first day that Amanda and I planned and executed a classroom lesson. Mine was pretty simple, it was a progressively difficult sentence construction activity from "I have a" (type of toy), to "I have a" (number of) (colour) (type of toy). I held up cards, and by the end I was able to go up to a random student and get them to say things like "I have three yellow computer games". Not terribly impressive considering this is all revision, but there you go.
Amanda's lesson was a bit more interactive. She had the kids divide up into pairs and then according to a prefilled in sheet, instruct the other child on which colour a particular object should be. If we filtered out all the Hungarian communication, I'm sure than in the raucous that ensued we would hear perfect English. "Colour the dog purple".
Awesome fun.
- Daniel
BTW: We've already identified the bad kids.
Hmm, looks like Daniel conveniently forgot to mention that he also taught the kids something else today....a new game that resulted in them all running around trying to slap each other!
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