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!)
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