Not nearly that painful!

So today was my first day in the school and all went pretty well. One kid greeted me with, "Are you the poor soul that wants to teach kids?" while another was super stoked because she wants to be a teacher, too.

The kids did a lot of really great activities today. Each day when they come in their teacher (Strecker) will have them all stand up. Then each student volunteers a sentence that includes at least one of the vocabulary words in the previous unit or their current unit (posted on the whiteboard). After successfully completing their sentence, they get to sit down. They go until everyone has contributed. Strecker told me today that it's not always vocabulary, but sometimes it's about lunch or something pertaining to the unit. Anything to make sure that they're using the language in a self-forming sort of way.

The second activity required the students to ask each other questions using verbs that use the preposition "an." Afterwards, they repeated the stand up/give sentence/sit down process, using sentences they'd gotten from each other. Periodically he would ask additional information, ie. "Jill is working on her English homework this weekend." "Oh, for a book? Jill, what for?" "For To Kill a Mockingbird." "Did you actually read it? Or sparknotes?" It was all light hearted and the kids really seemed to enjoy it.

What was also cool was that the kids have those cheap plastic faux-wood desks, right? Well, for one of their games they got to actually write on the desks with dry erase markers (because it comes right off)! They wrote sentences and left a blank for their vocabulary word, and then the other groups had to guess what word filled in the blank. It was really cool.

All in all, it was a great first day, and the language isn't nearly as high as I expected it to be. (It's been so long, there's a really big difference between college and high school German!)

Morgen beginnt mein Schulpraktikum!

In case you aren't familiar with the German language (and let's be honest, who really is?), tomorrow begins my student teaching. I'm going to be with a German 4 classroom, which is quite a bit intimidating. Personally, I never made it to German 4 in high school - the program was cut after we finished German 3. Our classes were always large and hectic because they were combined classes (German 1 and 3 at the same time, German 2 and 4 at the same time, etc.). The teacher did as good a job working with everyone as she could, but it was still a rough time.

So tomorrow I'll be over at the high school from 12:35 until 2pm, followed by class from 4:30 until 7pm. I'm definitely looking forward to it, but the idea of having to speak correct German for these students is absolutely terrifying. Maybe I can sit in the corner and hope for the best? Just teasing.

Craft wise I have done almost nothing lately (sad face), mostly due to lack of time. I do have at least one secret project that I need to work on before October gets here, but otherwise it's been relatively quiet around here. Yoshi's been clingy and kind of needy; I think my change of schedule and not being around as much is making her kind of miss me. Luckily I'll be backing off a bit with the hours at work, so she'll get to see me quite a bit more in the mornings (fewer 4am wake up calls are good for almost everyone, yes?).

Ah, so nervous...