Another Teaching Day, Another Anticipated Shopping Trip

After attempting to twist my body into a pretzel without harming myself at our morning yoga session, I showered then headed down to breakfast. We were served a wheat based thick porridge which we topped with a curry sauce and a hard boiled egg. I am loving the spiced coffee in the morning, to which a lot of milk is added. Breakfast over, we were transported to our work sites.

My kindergarten class started off a little rough. The children cannot sit still and focus on a story, even a simple picture book. The only thing I could manage during the story was to keep them seated; they had no interest in the pictures at all. They did better when given a worksheet to color, for some reason, every child in India is fascinated with coloring. At least I was able to end the class with a little dignity.

My next two classes, first and second grade, went well. It's a combined class and I taught first grade while the regular teach taught second, then we reversed. Reading books went better in these two classes; they kept more engaged. They also did well with their worksheets - especially when I let them color them when they were done. Even though I'm giving written assignments, I think that my main focus is to have them listen to English spoken by an English speaker and to have them speak to me as much as possible. From what I see, the teachers given them a lot of written English assignments, mainly copying sentences from the board.

After our classes with the students came our one hour conversational English class with the teachers. This is a fun hour and Claudia and I are finding that these women are curious about subjects about which all women are curious: hair coloring, cooking, clothes, shopping, etc. They also are very curious about President Obama and they wanted to take home the Time magazine special edition on Obama that Claudia found in the guesthouse so they could study all the pictures. I think they're trying to make up their minds if they like him or not. Presumeably, by studying the pictures, they feel they will know him better. :)

Lunch was waiting for us at the guest house: fried bread, a tomato/chicken dish, a spicy cooked spinach, and sliced cucumbers. Now we have time for lesson planning before we go to SEAM tonight for our evening tutoring session. After tutoring at SEAM, we are going shopping again. I'm going to the mall to pick up a few small gifts and to look for some Indian tops.

Well, better get to that lesson planning...