After a lovely weekend of shopping, preparation for my lessons, and meeting up with some other assistants in Montpellier, I had my first day of official teaching in my first two schools on Monday, and then my first day in my third school on Tuesday, which was quite daunting as I didn't know which classes I was meant to be in and when, but I somehow managed to navigate the days successfully thanks to the help of a few very helpful and kind French teachers!
On Monday I taught 4 one hour lessons to mainly year 6 equivalent age classes, and some year 5s, so their English was not too bad! I did the basic 'my name is...' at first, and managed to get every child to tell me their name in English, and then I showed them photos of my family, and we went through 'brother', 'sister' etc. They were particularly excited by the photo of our cat, Archie, although none of them could pronounce his name! Then I had some pictures of things in Plymouth and they learnt the words in English for a lighthouse, a swimming pool (Tinside Lido!), boat, countryside (Dartmoor), shopping centre (Drake Circus), and fireworks (I had a picture from the national firework competition!). Overall, they were pretty good at learning this vocab, and I got them to draw pictures in their books and label them in English, which they loved doing. Their French accents made words like lighthouse and countryside quite difficult to say, but we managed it in the end!! The schools on Monday not only had their two hour lunch break, but also had two half hour break times, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon, which I couldn't believe! So that meant that although I was there for seven hours, I was only teaching for four of them!
The school I went to on Tuesday only had two 15 minute break times in addition to the usual two hour lunch break, so that was much better! I taught seven classes in this school of about 45 minutes, although a couple of my lessons were only half an hour with some of the youngest children in the school, who were 6-7 years old, and very cute! Obviously their English was practically zilch, so I had to simplify my lesson a lot for them! We had some great games of guess the missing picture though, and some of them were actually quite good at remembering the English words so I was very impressed! The school was having their school photos done that day, so there was some interruption to the day with various classes having to go and have their photos done - it's obviously a big thing in France, because they were all taking it very seriously!
Anyway after these two days, I was very happy to come home to my bed, as it was pretty stressful and tiring! But now I know what I am doing and where I am supposed to be, so that will make things a lot easier when I go back after the holidays.
So now I'm officially on holiday!! Woop! I have some visitors coming - Emily, and then my mum and dad, so that will be fun, and nice to see them, and apart from that I am basically planning on being a tourist in my own town and exploring everything that the local area has to offer! Can't wait!
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