Training Complete

As of Tuesday we have fully completed our training and have met all our classes!

We have spent the last week being talked through lesson planning, sequencing, singing songs and looking at flash cards! We seem to have got so lucky in that our contact person/department has so much sorted for us.

The teachers in each of our schools are in charge of what the children are to learn that year and they are to work with us so that we can help the children meet these targets or trajectories. Because of this our department has prepared lesson sequences already and have them up on their website for us to use (its all here if anyone else is interested: http://www.ac-bordeaux.fr/ia24/index.php?id=212). What is even crazier is that we have been give 10 sequences of lessons, preplanned, with resources all printed out in folders for us to use. Literally all that we have to do is photocopy the worksheets and colour in some flashcards (which the children can do). Couldn’t ask for anything better!

Of course it is up to us to adapt these lessons to the correct age group/ability and along with the preplanned lessons we are able to teach bits about our own country, culture or what ever else we fancy. So it should be a nice balance of having to plan our own lessons, and using what we have been given to help us.

Yesterday Karine drove us round Perigueux and introduced us to our schools and classes. I have two primary schools with 5 classes in each. My first school is in Périgueux (Ecole élémentaire André-Davesne) and is about a 15 minute walk from my home. My second school, École élémentaire publique les Maurilloux is in the neighbouring town, Trelissac which will either be a quick bus ride or cycle away depending if I get a bike.

Most of my teachers seem lovely and both schools are quite small so that should help finding my way around/settling in! Even though we were only in each class for about 5 minutes so that I could meet the teachers the kids all seemed so keen! They were all happy when they realised their class had been picked to have an assistant and all chanted English words at us when we came in and left – they are too cute!

Now we have the rest of this week off, teaching next week and then we have two weeks of for Toussaint holidays! My parents are visiting the first week and then for the second I am off to Brussels/Ghent with Maeve and Steff. We booked our hostel yesterday for ghent – we’re staying on a boat, very excited!!