November with Elizabeth

What an exciting month it’s been here in Deauville! As we enter the holiday season, we are surrounded by the beautiful lights and cheer of Christmas time. While we are thinking of our family back at home, we are all counting our blessings and feeling the holiday spirit in other ways.

In Mid-November, I celebrated my 23^rd birthday with a weekend in Paris. Upon my return to school, I received about 30 drawings from my students as a birthday gift. I kept each one of them, and they remind me how much joy the children bring to me with their loving hearts and genuine spirits. Later that week, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a Deauville native, Fanny Hubert-Salmon, who spends a lot of time working in Lexington. I also discovered that Fanny and I have a connection back at home as well, through my dad, and one of her best friends. It was a humbling reminder of how small the world really is.  At Fanny’s home, we shared a delicious meal, with all the American fixins’ we could find. Fanny brought back corn bread mix from the last time she visited Kentucky, we had some makeshift cranberry sauce made from dried cranberries, green beans, sweet potatoes, mac and cheese, homemade rolls and cinnamon butter, and a chocolate hazelnut pie. In lieu of a turkey, which can be hard to find in France, we had a foie gras stuffed chicken. It was delicious. It was so wonderful to connect with someone who knows and loves our hometown so much. We got to talk about Kentucky basketball, and other sports, something I didn’t realized I missed so much until we talked about it. We are all so grateful to Fanny for opening her home to us. It turned what could have been a sad, homesick day into a wonderful experience of love and friendship. I hope that we will be able to continue our friendship upon our return to Lexington.

This past weekend, we also got to share in the illumination celebration in the center plaza of Deauville. Four kilometers of lights in total were strung around the city, decorating the trees and the light posts and forming a beautiful tent of light over the main roundabout in the city. Our students sang a song for the town that they had been practicing for weeks, and then with the push of a big red button, the town was transformed into a beautiful winter wonderland. This next month is sure to bring even more holiday cheer as we celebrate the season with our new friends, and see the delight in our students’ eyes as the magic of Christmas draws nearer.

Our day to day life here as a TA in Deauville has settled into a nice routine. There are early days, when we have to be at the school to greet the students before class starts, and there are later days, when we get to grab a few extra winks of sleep. I start my day usually at the nursey school, where the kids treat you as if you are a celebrity walking through their halls. Every time I walk into a room of my students I hear a chorus of, “Elizabet! Elizabet! Hellllllo! ‘Elllooo!” (The ‘th’ at the end of my name is impossible for most of them to pronounce, so we just go with Elizabet.) I start my days with songs usually. Songs that teach greetings, or how to say their name, or even just classic nursery rhymes. I think I sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” about 20 times a week. And then, we learn English through games and stories. Since I teach in the nursey, it’s a lot of me talking, and them playing, but it is an important building block in their English education. On Fridays, they get stickers, usually with English phrases on them, as a reward for a week of hard work. The stickers are a huge hit. Every day, we eat lunch and spend recreation with the kids. I have formed some special bonds with a handful of the kids, and I have learned that seeing the world through their eyes is something that adults often overlook, and because of that, we miss out on a lot of joy and wonder that the world has to offer. After school, the students have after school activities. When we aren’t helping out in the bigger groups, we are each responsible for our own activity. I run the English club every Tuesday, and we play games, make crafts, and watch movies that expose them to some American culture and a little bit of English language. One of their favorite activities was creating Halloween masks, and playing Thanskgiving bingo. They loved it! At the end of our days, we are tired, but we feel fulfilled and satisfied in the role that we are playing in these kids’ language and cultural education.

Until next time! Happy Holidays from Deauville!

                                    -Elizabeth

October with Andrew

         Using September as a month to settle in and really get going, we hit October full on. It took about a week or so to really get comfortable with being up in front of my kids and teaching them something that literally comes naturally to me. However, after some careful planning, I finally began to get the hang of it. In the first period of teaching I covered topics of introduction (asking names, favorite things, where they lived), and weather. Each day (except Wednesday) there are afterschool activities. Tuesdays there are two slots reserved for the Americans to take over, one cultural, and one hands-on. We took turns each week covering each. Elizabeth and I covered Kentucky one week with a reading of B is for Bluegrass and some derby coloring sheets, as well as making Halloween masks and watching kids Halloween films. In the hands-on, I taught the kids Dodgeball, Ninja, and how to make ice cream in a plastic bag. We will continue these until Christmas break where we will be covering topics that we choose over the course of the second half of the school year. 
         It’s not October without Halloween! My kids were overjoyed when I turned on the projector to show a Halloween presentation complete with a picture of me in a clown costume from several years ago, and a French Halloween song my teachers used to teach Halloween vocabulary words in my high school French classes. I also took this moment as a way to plug in Transylvania University's 'Pumpkin Mania' which astounded the children. On the last two days leading up to our first vacation, we held Halloween parties in the two countryside schools and learned just how much we (and the kids) love Spooky Bowling, regular bowling, but with bottles decorated to look like ghosts. The night before vacation we participated in the Deauville Halloween party that was held in a WW2 German-occupied villa in town. The party included a pumpkin carving station (ran by the TAs), a haunted house, mystery boxes, and a haunted underground bunker.

                                                             My masterpieces this year! 

During this month I did a decent amount of traveling both with the girls and alone. I took a weekend to surprise a sister from my host family in Lyon and used my layovers in Paris to revisit some sites (since the last time I was in France was 2015 with Sister Cities). Afterward, a local friend gave me a tour of the neighboring cities of Honfleur and Le Havre (where I also spent 3 days during the first week of vacation). With the first big vacation coming up at the end of the month we all decided it was a good idea to get out of Deauville and see some close by cities and countries. The first weekend we all hopped on the train to Paris where the girls spent a weekend while I continued to Reims to see some old friends. I then continued on to Le Havre, and a teacher at the Deauville elementary school gave the girls a day tour of Honfleur. The second week the travel bug was really getting at us, so we booked tickets on Brittany Ferries, and sailed off to London where we spent 5 days discovering the city, eating lots of fish and chips, pies, and drinking lots of tea. While the two weeks of vacation have been nice, we are excited to be back home in Deauville and are already looking forward to our next adventures in Europe and in teaching. 

-Andrew

Palais de Justice and Notre Dame Basilica in Lyon

London!

London Bridge wasn't falling down that day! 

Farewell, Deauville

Farewell to Deauville

There are several activities that the Americans will be participating in as the year comes to an end.

Each year, the kids in Deauville get awards. This year, the team of animateurs (which includes us) is in charge of it, so we have a prize for each child and I think they are all getting books. The prizes are anything from “best big brother award” to “dance award.” The actual awards will be given out tonight during the normal time of our APEs and a little afterwards as well, and families are invited to attend.

The Americans are also going to the D-Day beaches with the 5^th grade students from Deauville, where they will learn about the history of the Normandy landings and World War II. This is an all-day outing and we will not have English classes that day.

There will also be a triathlon taking place in Deauville along the beach and we will be spending a morning helping out with that and pointing the kids in the right direction.

For lesson plans, in my older classes, we have been working on the evaluations that they need to have taken by the end of the year, and in my younger classes, we have been working on summer vocabulary and food. They really like playing bingo, and the younger ones like to play vocabulary dominoes, where they have to connect the image of an item to the word.

This is the last blog entry before we go home at the end of the month. I’m thankful for all that I've learned here in these past 10 months! 

End of School Year

End of the School Year

The end of the school year is quickly approaching! At this point, we have around six and a half weeks of school left until we go home.

We are preparing to celebrate Family Day, where the kids and their families come to have fun, eat, and do activities. This year the theme is pirates, and the kids are going to be able to go on a treasure hunt. There will also be a face painting station where a fellow American and I will paint the kids’ faces with nautical themes, like putting on an eye patch and drawing a shark, and a gross motor activity where the kids will be able to move around and jump.

With the after-school activities, I am doing two days of craft activity where we will make things like paper bracelets, liquid chalk, and birdfeeders, one day of “Cirque” where the students are able to play with things found in the circus (for example, they will learn to juggle, balance a stick on their hand, spin a plate on a stick, and slackline). I then have a cooking activity where we make recipes!  

In terms of teaching, I am mostly preparing the older students to take their English evaluations that are required by France. These evaluations range from spelling to understanding classroom instructions to reading to memorizing a short poem in English. With the younger maternelle kids, we are learning about food vocabulary, and we have a song that they will learn. We will also play a lot of flashcard games that they like and bingo. At the end of the year we will have a breakfast and they will be able to use a lot of the vocabulary that we learned!

Thanks for reading!

Springtime in Deauville

It’s been a particularly wet and cold winter here in Deauville, more so than years in the past, so it has been very nice to have the sun come out recently. The first really nice day that we’ve had here since about November (where it’s been sunny and not too cold) was last Wednesday, and I celebrated it by going to the beach and spending time outdoors. I’m very excited for more days like that to come and for summer to finally get here!

With the kids, we’ve been learning about springtime by singing songs like “The Eensy Weensy Spider” and “Mr. Sun,” as well as some songs that have springtime animals in them like butterflies, ladybugs, bluebirds, frogs, etc. We practice our weather every day and it’s been nice to have the kids finally be able to say “it’s sunny and warm” rather than “it’s cloudy and cold!”

Another springtime lesson that I’ve done with the kids is prepositions with Easter eggs. Each student has an Easter egg that they made, and I (or another student) can tell them where to put the egg. For example, I can say “put the egg on your head” or “put the egg between your pencil case and your hand.” It’s a fun game and they get really into it, and you can use a lot of vocabulary when playing, like body parts and school materials.

Since it’s springtime, another thing that we’ve been learning about is The Very Hungry Caterpillar and all the different types of food that are in that story. We play flashcard games, like where I’ll scatter the flashcards of food around the room and say “point to the strawberries,” or hand them out to the students and ask them to raise it up if they have it, or put all of the flashcards on the board and have them memorize them and then have them close their eyes and take one away. Then they have to say what’s missing. The book is fairly popular in France as well and most of the children are already familiar with the story, and they like when I read to them, so it’s very fun.

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

Free Time for TAs

Outside of teaching, the TAs have a little bit of free time. I have Wednesdays off, and we all have the weekends off. We also have four two-week breaks during the year where we don’t teach and can relax and travel.

During the first break, all three of us went to Prague and Budapest. During the winter break my parents came and visited Deauville and I also visited some relatives in England. This past break in February, I went to Dublin, then came back to Deauville and met my family who visited again (my siblings couldn’t come the first time because their passports weren’t valid for three months after the intended date of departure), and then went skiing with another one of the TAs. Next break, we’re all going to go to Greece. Two weeks (the length of each break) is a good amount of time to go somewhere, and it’s pretty easy to get to the Paris airport with trains and public transportation!

The Basilica in Lisieux

Giant's Causeway in Ireland

Cliffs of Moher in Ireland

My family & me in Rouen

Prague

During the weekends, sometimes we’ll go to nearby cities like Le Havre, Honfleur, Bayeux, Lisieux, and Caen. I like to take walks, read, color, and watch Netflix, too. A significant amount of time is also spent trying to figure out plans for when we return to the States—applying for jobs and grad school and making big decisions!

Thanks for reading!  

Lesson Plans

As we approach our 3^rd break, it’s a good time to reflect on how teaching has been going and how lesson plans have been working out. In this blog post, I’m going to be writing about a great class that I had recently. The CM1 and CM2 class (4^th and 5^th grade) at St. Arnoult is always a delightful group of kids. They are energetic, enthusiastic, and fun.

We started off the class doing our rituals. For this, we have flashcards that represent different questions (like “what’s your name,” “how are you,” and “where do you live”). The kids raise their hand and say the question, and once they get the question right they can come up to the front of the class and ask their peers to answer it. This usually takes 5-10 minutes. After we did our rituals, the kids had the floor to ask me any questions they had about schools in America. They were very curious about it, and we discussed differences between the US and France, like how in some schools in America and England the students wear uniforms, the different names of each grade level, and what happens at graduation. The class was especially interested to hear about the tradition of throwing your cap up when you graduate!

After that, the teacher for the class had found a short video of what elementary school is like in England, so we watched that. In it, they talked about what time different things start during the school day, what classes they take, and what recess and lunch are like. When it was finished, we reviewed a little of what happened in the video and then learned the poem “Come in Please” with motions. It goes like this:

Come in Please  

1, 2, 3, 4

Come in please

and shut the door.

5, 6, 7, 8,

It’s time for school,

You’re very late.

9, 10, 9, 10

Don’t be late

for school again!

 

After that, we reviewed school materials like a backpack, pencil, pen, notebook, glue, etc. We played a game where I put the flashcards on the board, they closed their eyes, and then I removed one and mixed up the remaining flashcards. They then had to figure out which flashcard was missing.

At this point, class was almost over, but they really wanted to do Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, so we did that. They then requested we do the Hokey Pokey, so we got in a circle in the room and did that too! They really enjoyed being silly and shaking their arms, legs, hair, and tongue, and it was super fun. Plus, the whole song was in English, so they got to practice their vocabulary! The class period was a hoot and I think that they learned a lot.

Until next time!

Extracurricular Activities

Hello! Today I’m going to be talking a little about extracurricular activities as a TA.

                

During school times, there are no organized activities, but when the students have recess, we are able to hang out and play with them. The students typically always have a game of soccer going on, and it’s common to also have a game of catch or some version of hide and seek. The kids also play with jump ropes a lot, practicing going fast and doing crossovers. They also like to play “l’horloge” where one person stands in the middle, swinging a jump rope from one end in a circle close to the ground, and the other students stand around them in a circle and jump over it when it comes to them.

                

This trimester, I’m leading some after-school extracurricular activities that should be really fun. The theme for this section of activities, or APEs, is books. On Mondays, I help lead a Recipe Book activity with the CMs (4^th and 5^th graders) and we will be compiling a list of recipes and making them. Some recipes we are going to be making include ants on a log, fruit salad, a regular salad, an energy bar, and banana pops.

               

The rest of the days (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays) I lead a puppets activity, where we will be reading or listening to different fairy tales such as Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Goldilocks. After we read the stories, we will make puppets for the different characters and then put on a little play with them. I’m doing this activity with CPs, CE1s, and CE2s (1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rdgraders). The first week, we decorated a cardboard theater for the plays.

              

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful day!