It's been another good but exhausting week! I got my timetable on Monday, and started on it straight away. I'm pleased with the classes I have been put with. 6 lessons a week with Year 6, 6 with Year 5, and 6 with Year 3, all the same teacher for each year group (there are three different teachers for each year at the school), plus a few odd lessons with Year 4 and TEP. The classes are mostly lower set Maths or English, but a couple are second set. The TEP classes involve me taking 8 kids out of lessons three times a week to read with them, These are the kids who don't speak much English and spend every morning of school learning English, and then their afternoons back with their usual classes. I like that I will always have the same kids each session, as I will get to know them really well. Reading with these kids is a different skill to reading with the kids who speak good English. Sometimes, they learn the words in a book, but they don't actually understand what has been said. What I have to do is ask questions about the pictures, make sure they understand every word, and that their pronunciation is correct. I was a bit rubbish on my first attempt, but I know have the hang of it, and know what questions to ask. I've found that asking questions actually works really well in with any child, as more often than not, there are words they don't understand, but don't let you know.
On Tuesday, I was given my first class group to run a lesson with, start to finish with no other teacher there. I had 8 kids in the bottom English set for Year 6. The class teacher had her own group of kids, who were part of TEP, so the class had been split into those who don't speak good English, and everyone else. It was the last lesson of the day and their attention spans were not brilliant, plus I was only told that I was doing this 5 minutes before it started, but I survived! /The kids all did their work, and the only thing wrong was that they were quite noisy. I hadn't really noticed, because I was so focused on everything else about the lesson! I think it went OK, and the teacher told me that I did absolutely fine. I already know how I will improve for next week, and am quite looking forward to it. I was absolutely exhausted after it though!!! Just to exhaust me more, the same day was my first after school club. I am running an art and crafts club for kids in reception to year 3, with one of the Year 5 teachers (who is a really fantastic teacher) We had 25 kids, and had them colouring in Disney pictures. Things will get more interesting as we go on, but we wanted to do something easy while we worked out how many we would have, and what ages they were. It went well, but it's a tiring day on Tuesdays!
Our German language lessons are... OK. Mondays lesson was good, but on Wednesday I was really bored! The class took so long to do an exercise in the text book that we didn't have time to start something new like we were meant to, and the rest of the lesson became a 'filler' lesson. My understanding of written German seems to be quite good, so we worked through the book really fast, then were bored for the rest of the lesson. Not good when your only 2 weeks in. At this rate i'm not sure how much we will learn by Christmas.
On Friday night, we went out in Duisburg with a small group of friends. We went to a German pub which was great, and it had a bowling ally in the basement. It just has one lane, and the balls don't have holes in them so you have to throw them with two hands. The photo below is of Matt demonstrating the 'backwards throw' technique. We had beer cocktails (interesting), and went for some Chinese food after (amazing, and so cheap!). A good night was had by all, and it wasn't even a late night.
Today, Matt went to see Duisburg play football with some people from school (friends who play football with Matt after work on Fridays). I went shopping in Dusseldorf with one of my new pals, and then we had lunch by the Rhine, and a few others came to meet us for a Radler (shandy) and some ice cream. It was a really nice relaxing day in the sunshine.
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