Little Peter Pans

Happy 2011! Yikes! I haven’t posted since Thanksgiving. Here are my Poland December highlights (Chicago December highlights to follow in a later post):

Preschool/Kindergarten English Lessons

You might remember me saying that this year I’m teaching one preschool class and one kindergarten class in the Czech Republic on Mondays. Here’s an update about our lessons. (Sorry, I can't post any photographs. Teachers aren’t allowed to photograph the students at this school.)

3-year-olds: Their curiosity and desire to learn new English words is wonderfully insatiable. I teach them 3-4 new words every week, but they’re always asking me how to say different words in English that I haven’t taught them yet. For example, during one lesson in December when we learned “red,” “blue,” “yellow,” and “green,” one of my students pointed to a purple pillow and asked me, “What color is it [in English]?” I said, “purple” and he said “No!” and laughed and laughed and laughed. He didn’t believe me! He thought I was saying a pretend word. When his mom picked him up, he told her that, “Sarah is very, very silly and makes me laugh.” Luckily, 99.9% of the time, they believe me when I teach them a new word.

Also, now that it’s freezing outside and almost always snowing, my 3-year-olds arrive to our lesson all bundled up like the little brother in “A Christmas Story”. I call them my little “Peter Pans” because they only wear tights (no pants/trousers) under their snow pants (both the girls and the boys) and run around in the lesson only wearing their tights and t-shirts.

5/6-year-olds: I’m always laughing during our lessons because they are the most angelic, mischievous kindergarteners I’ve ever met. What’s amazing is that we’ve settled into a great routine and I never feel like we have difficulties communicating. Sometimes I say they communicate with “caveman sounds” – little grunts or noises that mean, “Sarah, my green colored pencil needs to be sharpened,” or “Where did the cat puppet go?” We have a “Hello” song we sing at the beginning of the lesson and a “Goodbye” song for the end. Whenever I try to start singing the “Goodbye” song, they say, “No! No goodbye!” And they give the best hugs when their moms and dads pick them up. And they also frequently convince me to give them two “reward stickers” at the end of the lesson instead of one.

Our favorite word-learning games:

1. We have picture flashcards for all our new words because, of course, they can’t read! They love it when – after we’ve practiced the new words for one or two lessons – I point to a flashcard and confidently say the wrong word. (For example, I point to “Daddy” but say “Sister”.) They love correcting me.

2. One day, I hid our 6 new flashcards around the classroom and sang a silly little “let’s all look for (fill in one of the new vocabulary words)” song. Now it’s a staple activity and sometimes they’ll start singing the song to tell me that they want to play the game. We hide all of the flashcards in the room and then I say what word to look for. Sometimes I let them hide the flashcards although I learned the hard way that you MUST pay very close attention if you let them hide the cards. Turn your back for one minute and you’re in trouble. Try convincing a mischievous 5-year-old to tell you where he hid his card after you and the other students have searched unsuccessfully for 3 minutes.

Mini-Lawrence Reunion

It was a Lawrence Class of 2009 mini-reunion when Vanessa visited for a weekend! She’s teaching English in Austria this year and traveled up to Cieszyn the first weekend of December. On Saturday, we traveled to the picturesque village of Štramberk in the Czech Republic and on Sunday we went to Krakow for the Christmas market and nativity scene competition. Here's a photograph of Štramberk and I love this photograph of Vanessa because not only is she wearing her Green Bay Packer hat, but she’s also sitting on my favorite train that I call “Mister Rogers’ trolley” because it only has one car and it’s red.

What I loved best about her visit was the opportunity to talk with someone who’s also teaching English in Central Europe and all the time we had to share our experiences with someone who is in the same (or at least a very similar) boat. I loved talking with Vanessa about European school systems, Central Europe’s obsession with asking customers to pay for everything with exact change, and how we’ve suddenly found ourselves covering every slice of bread we eat with butter because that’s how they eat it here. It was especially fun to talk to someone who’s also experiencing the “they-brought-me-here-to-teach-English-but-by-the-time-I-leave-I-probably-won’t-be-able-to-speak-a-single-word-of-it” phenomenon. Despite the fact that I spend the majority of my waking hours teaching and therefore speaking English, it sometimes amazes me how quickly I feel I’m losing some of my vocabulary, particularly slang and idioms. (Lately my favorite activity is – sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally – inventing my own idioms when I can’t remember the correct ones. Since last winter I’ve subscribed to a website for English language learners that e-mails me 3 English idioms a day in the hope that this will help keep them fresh in my mind. And it has helped...a little.) Vanessa and I frequently asked each other questions like, “What’s the word that means...,” “What’s it called when...,” and “What’s the idiom that starts...” Our Austrian and Polish students would have laughed out loud if they had heard our conversations – we didn’t always sound like native speakers; frequently we sounded much more like our students!

Christmas Parties at School

At the end of December, when other teachers at my school are expected to administer final exams, I’m expected to throw American Christmas parties during my lessons. It’s a pretty awesome job requirement.

About half of my classes voted for Christmas baking parties and the other half voted for a lesson of singing Christmas carols and playing Christmas-themed language games. When I learned that my students had never eaten cupcakes before (probably one of my favorite desserts in the world), a few Christmas cookie parties turned into Christmas cupcake parties. I might never eat a yellow cupcake (I baked 12 dozen) or a sugar cookie (I baked 14 dozen) again, but the baking parties were a blast. I especially loved watching my students decorate their cookies and cupcakes. Everyone, from my 8^th grade students to my 12^th grade students, took great care in decorating their treats and created beautiful, edible works of art. And my students all agreed that cupcakes are delicious!

For my classes that didn’t want to bake and decorate, we sang their favorite carols and played silly Christmas games. Their favorite games were “Blind Drawing” and “Snowballs” (not very creative game names, I know). For “Blind Drawing,” students had to "blind draw" a Christmas scene described by another student (they hold books with paper over their heads so they can’t see what they are drawing). It’s great speaking and listening practice and the works of “art” they create are quite funny.

“Snowballs” was the last game we played, and it didn’t – I’ll admit – have an English component except for listening to the rules. Here’s how you play. You blindfold two students, give each student a cup, put a bowl of cotton balls (the “snowballs”) in-between them, and give them 1 minute to transfer as many "snowballs" as they can from the bowl to their cup. It’s a pretty impossible game because cotton balls are so lightweight that you can never tell if you actually have some on your spoon or not. It’s hilarious to watch someone very carefully transport air (they think they have a cotton ball on their spoon but they don’t) from the bowl to his or her cup. And there’s always lots of cheating because students love to secretly empty the blindfolded person’s cup during the game. We laughed so hard we cried when playing this game. My students always work so incredibly hard in my lessons so this was a fun, silly way to end a great semester.

Officially Legal!

In the fall, we had a couple very serious difficulties when trying to renew my visa for Year Two due to a slight miscommunication between the school and the visa office about the renewal process. Luckily the government granted me a “special circumstance” short-term visa to cover my first three months of teaching, but only under the condition that I would have to leave Poland for a while in December and then re-enter if I wanted to apply for January – June. My director joked that it was either Ukraine or Chicago for Christmas (the problem is that I had to leave not only Poland but the EU). Don’t worry, it’s a story with a happy ending – I had a wonderful two weeks in Chicago, and yesterday I picked up my new Poland visa/residence card and now I’m legal until the end of the school year! I left Poland on December 18 for Chicago...and here's where the next post will pick up!