27 September 2013

27 September 2013

Today I got up and had a breakfast of Kasha. Host-Mom and I left at about the same time – her to her job, and me to Russian. There, we learned another tongue-twister (about Count Pato playing the lottery), and practiced it for a long time. After that, we went on to reading Cyrillic cursive. It is required by law that all Ukrainian students write in cursive, not block. We had to try to say several words written in cursive. After fumbling over the letters, we went on to safety phrases. There are only a few for now, but they are important ones. Stop it! Who’s there? I’m calling the police. I won’t let you in. We practiced them a bit, and then drew most of our Community Map.

Earlier in the week, we had to go out and find important parts of our community. We marked their locations, and reported back to the class. We combined each other’s maps and created our map. We were only to finish about half of the map, as we planned extensively first. We can finish it on Monday. After that, we read and answered questions that we had learned previously. We had to conjugate some words on the fly while speaking. We took a quick break.

All of us had asked V. if she could exchange some money for us. Note – if you ever want to exchange money, you need Ukrainian documents, and the bills have to be perfect and new. V. exchanged some of it, and we split it up among us. V is going back to Chernigov this weekend, and thinks she will be able to exchange the rest, so myself and another bowed out of “now,” which meant that we didn’t have to try to split money 5 ways, with about a third of it still in USD! Earlier in the week, I’d bought a strawberry flavored milk product that I didn’t know what it was. I tried it during the break. Turned out it was drinkable yogurt! Think Yoplait, only thinner, stronger flavor, less sweet, and fresher-tasting. It was awesome!

After our break, we had a listening exercise, where he had to pick out the important information about PCV John and his families, both American and Ukrainian. We listened to it several times, filling in information. After listening to the script one last time, we answered questions about the text, and said what information was given in the script, but not questioned.

After our listening exercise, we learned the question words. Now we can asked qestions including who, what, when, where, why, and how. We also learned how to say “o’clock” which is important, as we need to talk to our families about when we want breakfast and dinner. We practiced asking and answering questions about hobbies, conjugating the verbs for the tenses. After that, we had lunch, wrote down our schedule for next week, and went across the hall to S.’s apt and our Tech Session.

The first thing we did was to go over the various popular methods of teaching a language: Grammar translation, Audio-Lingual, Direct, Total physical response, and the new Communicative Approach (CA). All of the various methods have their advantages, and their disadvantages. The CA is what PC Ukraine uses to teach English. It is a method that focuses on communication above and beyond all else, as well as being a student-centered approach to learning a language. Like all things, it has its disadvantages, but they are far fewer than other methods. The CA was developed specifically to help teach communication between two languages, and is a blending of the advantages of many other styles: vocab taught by translation, pronunciation taught by repetition, target language spoken exclusive of vocab, and miming is used to teach simple words. Group work and creativity are stressed.

After that, we went over what we are going to do tomorrow, and how we are going to go about doing them. Then, we went over our Tech Session schedule for the upcoming week, and decided who was going to take the community map with them, so we could bring it with us to Obukhiv 2. We also got a thumb drive’s worth of manuals to use.

After class, I went back to my host-Mom’s apartment, where I did most of my homework for the weekend. Still have to visit the apartment of another PCT. I also filled in the answers in my PC UA PTS TEFL manual, as I had gotten the answers but not collated them before. I finished my community map for my Emergency locator form (ELF), and took a picture of if to upload with my ELF. I also edited, processed, and uploaded the pictures I took at the hotel in Chernigov on day one. I edited a blog post, and added a picture from day one to the post.

I spent some time online, waiting for my host-Mom to come home. The granddaughter (who will now be called my host-sister for clarity’s sake) was here from Kyiv, but she had to go to something downtown. Both host-Mom and host-sister were home at around the same time, about 8pm. Host-Mom had bags of vegetables picked from her garden. As soon as host-sister got back, host-Mom served us soup for dinner, berating me soundly in Russian for not eating earlier in the evening. After dinner, I had a bucket bath. It was colder than earlier in the week, as the apartment building doesn’t have heat yet. Still, a chilly air bucket bath is better than no shower. Host-Sister needed to do some translations for homework, so she used the computer in my room.