Ecole Elementaire de Vimines
It's been a while since I have posted. I have been a bit preoccupied with starting to teach, preparing my lessons and just realising that I still have not settled in quite yet! Moving to another country definitely can take you on an emotional journey. Just a little about lesson prep to start (oh so exciting I know!).. well it's time consuming for one thing!! All I seem to do these days is teach, come back and prepare more lessons to teach. GAH! Definitely rethinking about whether I'd ever want to be a teacher. The problem is that it is definitely necessary to prepare lessons - there's no blagging them! At least not at the start when I am not too sure as to what I'm doing. I've once experienced the painful feeling of having finished all I had prepared and still having 15 minutes left of lesson to blag - NEVER AGAIN will I under plan! Thankfully I have 2 teachers (out of 12) who help me slightly and give me ideas! And my amazing mum who sent me a ridiculous amount of flashcards to do games with. (THANK YOU!)
Anyway, this post is going to be specifically about Vimines, the primary school I teach at on Tuesday afternoons (I haven't got any photos of the other schools yet).
I have to travel 45 minutes by bus to get to this tiny village in the mountains for 3 hrs worth of teaching! But it doesn't bother me because of the amazing view I get on my way up and down from Vimines!
And Vimines itself is a cute village :)
What I didn't realise would happen is that I would be taking the same bus as all the kids I teach back to Cognin (this place where I change buses):
I have to wait at the bus stop outside the school with them and they kind of just look at me and jump off the roof of the bus shelter in front of me to scare me. Aren't kids lovely? This time round I let them get on the bus first and they went to the back of the bus whereas I decided I would sit at the front to get some peace. However, they all came to sit next to me when they saw where I was and asked me question after question! In the end I found it pretty sweet that they were so interested in me. But they were pretty offended and couldn't understand why I'd forgotten their names from the English lesson I'd just given (bear in mind I teach over 300 children with 100 in Vimines alone.. (oh wow, i'd never actually realised that it was THAT many kids until this moment!!!)). The teaching itself goes ridiculously quickly (most of the time) which is nice!! We say Hello! to each other and shake hands, sing a song, learn some vocabulary such as colours, play a game or two and occasionally do a colouring. And then it's time to move swiftly on to the next class where the lesson is repeated. And then to the third class...and the fourth... and then I'm ready to never say Hello! to anybody again!!!! This is the basics of my teaching experience so far! A plus, bisous!
