18 and 19 October 2013

18 and 19 October 2013

On Saturday, I got up, had breakfast, and walked to S’s flat, where we had a link cluster tech session, which was about teaching young learners. We learned the important parts of how to teach them, and some activities that can be done with them. There are important things to remember, as most of these learners don’t necessarily have a great grasp of their native language. Keep it simple. Keep if fun. Keep it positive. We had a brief week debrief, when we talked about what we did this week, telling the other cluster how our week went and learning how their week went. After that, we went over our technical schedule for the next week. I learned that I am co-facilitating a technical session on Wednesday, as our cluster is going to Kyiv on Thursday.

 

After we went over our schedule, we had a X/C session, which was on Ukrainian history. We went over both the origins of Ukraine, and the Orange Revolution. I was the only one who recognized Brezhnev, but I couldn't recognize the national poet. After our X/C session, we went to a museum in Obukhiv, where our tour guide was a former journalist, who also made many (all) of the clay figurines on display.

After the museum, we went to the bazaar, where I bought 10m of wallpaper, because the wallpaper cost me less than a single flipchart, plus it is longer. After the bazaar, I walked back to my host-family’s flat, where I made myself lunch. I was just getting to relaxing when I got a text, telling me when we were having our community project update. Given when I was texted, I knew I would be late (I wasn’t even halfway finished with lunch), so I took my time finishing my lunch.

 During the community project check-in, we went over what we’d done so far, which was mainly look for the videos and decide on what we wanted. I’m in charge of creating original dialogues for the videos. Someone else is drawing our comics, and writing dialogues based on what I’m writing.

After our meeting, I went to the grocery store on the way back. I realized shortly after that I’d forgotten some things, so I made a note to go back on Sunday. After that, I made myself tea finished my technical home task – I needed to put what I did this week into the TEFL PST notebook, and fill in various parts of the TEFL book. I also wrote a lesson plan for Tuesday’s lesson plan – I’m teaching an episode of Hound of the Baskervilles. I had dinner with my family, and watched a little X-Factor. It doesn’t make that much sense, as most of it is talking (mixed Russian and Ukrainian), and only a little bit of it is singing. My host-mom came back while my host-sister and I were watching TV. The great-uncle of my host-sister came over, and watched a bit of X-factor with her, while I made Vareniki with my host-Mom. She made the dough, but made sure to come and get me before she formed the dumplings.

We made cottage cheese vareniki, which means that you take a piece of dough, flatten in to a circle, put a scoop of cottage cheese in the centre, and fold the dumpling over, pressing the edges together into one. The are remarkably easy to make. We all ate some with sour cream, and then I was able to make a quick update on my blog before going to bed.

Sunday, I got up late and had breakfast, before spending a few minutes online. I was cooking borshch in the afternoon, so I wanted to check my email and make sure the US government hadn’t shut down, again, overnight. After that, I joined my host-mom in the kitchen, and started making borshch, and guloopsi (stuffed cabbages). I washed, peeled, sliced, and/or grated many vegetables, while the chicken was boiling into bouillon, before helping with the guloopsi. My host-sister used a hand-crank meat

grinder to grind up some chicken, and my host-mom cooked rice. While they were doing this, I sliced potatoes, which were added to the bouillon. The carrots, onion, and beets were already cooked. I helped to fry carrots and onions on the stove, before mixing them into the chicken and rice mixture. You mix it by hand, and boiled rice has a very distinctive texture. Once it was mixed, I put a spoonful of the mixture on to a cooked cabbage leaf, and rolled the leaf up tightly. We started them cooking, and mixed everything together for borshch. After everything was on the stove cooking, I did the washing up and walked to the store, where I bought the things I’d forgotten the day before.

I walked back, and washed my clothes, so I could have practice washing jeans and dress trousers by hand. It was much harder to wash them than it was to wash t-shirts and jumpers. Then, I had lunch with my host-mom (borshch and guloopsi), and had coffee with my host family. After that, my host-mom took a nap, and I downloaded, edited, and posted some of my photos. I edited a few earlier blog posts, adding photos to the ones I had photos for. I have a backlog of photos and blog entries at this point. I spent a lot of time on this. I also wrote a dialogue for our community project, and emailed to my group, who liked it.

After dinner (more borshch),  I got a shower, and then got started on typing up the many previous days blog entries. I got up to mid-day Friday before I had to stop and go to bed.