21 October 2013

21 October 2013

Moday, I got up, got dressed, had breakfast, and walked down to class. Monday was the first day of rotation, so we have a new LFC, P. P met us and gave us our mock-LPI. I went first, and got to answer questions about what I didn’t know in Russian. P is a very nice and patient teacher, but, to me, the mock-“interview” seemed more stressful than Daniel Malloy must have felt facing down Louis de Pointe du Lac in Interview With The Vampire, because, in the real LPI, I can be declared “not qualified” in Russian. Not entirely sure what that would mean for my PC choices, but I know it would be “a bit not good, yeah.” I now have even more vocabulary that I need to study and memorize, and not too long to do it in. After I was finished, I rejoined the group, where we had to write out and draw what we do and have done in Obukhiv. We spent a lot time on that, as we had 12 squares to fill, and we had to put 3 sentences and a picture in each one. One picture has the 6 of us cooking borshch, and you can tell who is who, even though we are all stick-figures, drawn in black marker. We had a break while we were all doing our LPIs, we made coffee and tea, and had biscuits. We’d all brought something for P, so we had extra biscuits and sweets.

We went back to our LPI and creating our history map of our doings in Obukhiv. After we were all finished, P went over the list of helpful activities, and we asked him a lot of questions. After that, we went over the basics of Russian grammar, so he could see what we know. We divided words in to parts of speech, and parts of speech into changeable and unchangeable. We also put the parts of speech with what they modify and explained why we thought that. After that was our lunch break (more coffee and tea) and my individual tutoring.

There, we went over my mistakes on my LPI, and then my home tasks for previous lessons. I had made a number of mistakes, most of which were on the more recent vocabulary, or the vocab that I hadn’t had a chance to add to my personal glossary. We went over a paragraph that I’d written about my US room, and practiced my pronunciation on the complicated words.

After that, I walked to School #5, as we had English club there. Today’s topic was Halloween, as the students were very interested in how we celebrate the holiday. L and I had the middle ages (11-13). We played a clip of The Phantom of the Opera, and had a mummy race. This one had a trick. The standard rules applied – the first person to make it to back to the starting place won. First, they divided into groups, and were given a roll of toilet paper. They had to wrap up a group member in tp, without ripping it. If it ripped, they had to start all over again in the wrapping process. After a few false starts (covering the eyes, tearing and trying to cover it), both groups got a member wrapped from head to feet in tp. That wrapped person had to hop a few metres forward and back, then get unwrapped before the other person. It was a tie – one group hopped faster, but the other group was faster getting the tp off. Then we passed out sweets, but we had them ask for them: Trick or Treat. We then talked about how Halloween is celebrated in the US, from costumes to parties. We had the say who or what they would dress-up as for Halloween. Then, it was time to go, so they left and we went to our lesson-plan tutoring. M and I went over our plan for our tech session facilitation on Wednesday, and then had our lesson-plan tutoring. My entire lesson is on a comic from Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles. Which has vocab practice, which practices pronouns. Tomorrow is a double lesson, so I have 90 minutes to fill.