A Day in the Life

Hi, to everyone reading this blog! I hope you’re having a fantastic day!

                

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Denise, and I’m currently a TA in Deauville, teaching English to French kiddos aged 3-10 years old. In this blog post I’m going to be talking about a typical day in the life of a Deauville TA, or at least my own typical day. Actually, this is going to be more of an overview of my week, so let’s all get pumped for that!

The "Maison des Americains," our home

                

My schedule is pretty complicated, so it depends on the day what I’ll do. I’ll try to be as clear as I can be, though! If I have classes in the morning (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays) I’ll wake up at 8 to get ready, and leave our house in Deauville at around 8:45 to get to the school in St. Arnoult, which is a town about 7 minutes away by car, and set up for classes starting at 9. I teach the MS class (preschool) and then the combined GS/CP class (kindergarten and 1^st grade) on Tuesdays and Thursdays, splitting the GS/CP class into two different 30-minute classes on Thursday. For example, I will take the GS kids and teach them a 30 minute lesson, then the CPs. I also teach the combined CM1/CM2 class (4^th and 5^th grade) on Thursday morning.

Place Morny, near our house

A lot of the classes are combined, because there aren’t a lot of people who go to that school. There are only 4 classrooms for an entire school of kids younger than preschool to 5^th grade at St. Arnoult, and there are only two main teachers at Tourgéville, the other school where I teach. It makes for an interesting vibe in each class; there are many different levels that you cater to, all at the same time.

I don’t have morning classes on Monday, but we typically have a meeting with us three Americans and our director to talk about how everything is going from 10:30 to 11:30. On Wednesday I have no class, which can be a nice break to catch up on sleep and lesson planning and other errands I might need to run. This Wednesday I got to go to the Humane Society in the next-door town and walk dogs with one of the other Americans, and had a blast. I am looking forward to getting my dog time in by going there a lot in the future!

                

So, after the morning is over, I go to the school in Deauville for lunchtime, which starts at 11:45. Let me just talk about the school lunches that they serve here. They are amazing. First, they serve an appetizer-type thing. Sometimes it’s soup, sometimes it’s a salad, sometimes it’s something else, but every day it’s good. Then, they serve sliced baguette, and then they serve a meat and a side. After that, they usually serve a fruit or another type of dessert. Sometimes they serve a little cheese and bread before the dessert. Everything they serve is made very well and is delicious.

               

In the actual cafeteria, it’s very much unlike an American cafeteria, or at least the cafeterias I grew up with. There are tables with six people at each table. There are actual, real-life place settings for each person, with a plate, fork, knife, spoon, and glass. Food is brought to each table individually in separate dishes with enough food for six people, and there are pitchers of water at each table. The animateurs (that includes me and the other Americans, as well as many other people) sit at the tables with the kids and eat with and supervise them during this time. The younger kids at school have recess and then they eat, but I eat with the bigger kids, who switch with them and eat first and then have their recess.

               

I leave at a little after 1PM each day to go teach, and at this point the kids have finished lunch and are still playing so I don’t get to be there for the whole recess. I take the car to Tourgéville if it’s a Monday or Tuesday and to St. Arnoult if it’s a Thursday or Friday. I start teaching at 1:30 at both of them. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I teach a combined CE2/CM1/CM2 class (3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th graders), then a combined CP/CE1 class (1^st and 2^nd graders), and then a MS/GS class (preschool and kindergarteners). On Thursday afternoons, I teach a combined CE1/CE2 class (2^nd and 3^rd graders), and on Fridays I teach that same class but divided into two different groups (30 minutes for each group), and then I take either the CM1s or the CM2s and teach, but the grade I take alternates week by week.

              

The kids I teach are super energetic (sometimes scary energetic) and a lot of them are very motivated to learn English, which encourages me and raises my spirits. English lessons are 45 minutes long for the older kids and 30 minutes for the younger ones, and time can definitely fly by if I have planned my lesson well and they’re interested in it.

                

After class time is over, I lead after-school activities, or APEs as they call them here, at the school in Deauville, starting at 4. On Mondays and Tuesdays it’s kind of a rush to get back to the school, because I finish teaching at 3:45 at Tourgéville. The activities are led by the animateurs. The kids have signed up for which activity they want to do, depending on which activity is available for their grade level. I lead a Craft activity with CMs, Board Games with the CEs, an activity about Art Vocabulary with CMs, and then an American Folk Dance activity with the CPs throughout the week. These activities can be super fun, but they also have their challenges. I think the kids for sure enjoy them!

                

After the activities (APEs) are done at 5, the animateurs have garderie. This is a time where the kids are allowed to play outside for a little bit, and then we go inside and help them with their homework. Usually they have reading, spelling, or math to do. They can go back outside after their homework is done, but recently since the time changed, it has been too cold and dark to go back out, and so we play games inside.

                

Deauville Beach

At 6, the Americans are finished with garderie and go home. At this point, I am usually pretty exhausted, so I start getting dinner ready, change into more comfortable clothes, and chill out and plan lessons or do some other activity (recently I’ve been on a kick of listening to podcasts. If you have any good recommendations, please let me know!) until I write in my journal and then go to bed. I try to go to sleep by 9:30, but a lot of days that doesn’t happen. Then it starts over again!

               

I hope this has been informative for you and that it gives you at least a little sense of what it’s like to be an English TA in Deauville! There is so much more to say about specific events and stories, things that have happened, and our travels over our recent fall break, but I think I’ll save those for a later entry. So stay posted!

                

I appreciate you and wish you all the best! Goodbye for now! 

Christmas Time

The holiday season in Deauville wore bright Christmas lights running down every street to create refuge in winter’s time. In December, the sunsets as early as 5pm. These early ends to daylight would be depressing had it not been for Deauville’s bright holiday aesthetic: the roundabout entering the town was surrounded by dancing horses of light, the place Morney had a factitious starlit sky, and the Casino was brighter than ever before.

The holiday season spent into the schools as well, from the courtyards to the classroom. Each class is decorated with a jolie sapin (pretty Christmas tree) and the English lessons gravitate to this most wonderful time of year.  In English class, we’ve spent our late November and early December days of Christmas flashcards, Christmas classics, traditions and the choral sounds of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” graced our ears for the months to come.

With one of my classes we prepared the aforementioned holiday jingle for holiday event with the parents. As I work at three different schools, I had the pleasure to attend three different Christmas holidays where the teachers meet the parents and exchange holiday cheer. Deauville even hired a magician for an afterschool event to celebrate the season.

The joy and restless children brought us to the final major event in Deauville before the break: turning on the town Christmas lights. The whole school and a large part of the town attended the event, the little ones sang, and an even younger child had the honor of pressing the button for the lights. Despite the cold and dark times of the year, Deauville finds a way to keep the reverie shining.

A Monday November Kind-of Day

Teaching English abroad carries a conception that doesn't always have much luminosity: the before and after are recently polished glass, but the in-between is often obscure to our perception. Even in the first couple months when the routine and works tastes new, it's difficult to grasp what you're doing from the day-to-day because the day-to-day is fleeting and ever-changing. After the completion of two months and being well into my third in Deauville,  the everyday begins to have a rhythm.  To elucidate what being a TA in Deauville means, let us follow the beat of my average Monday sat working.

9am-930am English with CE at St Arnoult 

             Every morning I begin the day at St Arnoult, a small town about an eight minute drive outside of Deauville. On Monday's I begin the day with the CE, who are the second to oldest group of children we teach. At this level we begin to do a few writing exercises, but the teaching is still mostly auditory.

930am- 1015am English with CM

            CM is last two years of primary school in France, before they go off to Middle School[college]. This is the age we begin to write sentences in English together. At this age the years of repetitive English is beginning to stick and you get to teach more and more interesting material to learn how to communicate in English. Because writing often takes more time than the oral exercises, each class with the CM is 45 minutes instead of 30. 

1030am-1145am Meeting with English Team

            After finishing up at St Arnoult, I make my way back in the Yaris to Deauville to our Monday morning meetings. Due to the commute, I often arrive like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, only to find out that the big hand hits the six as I walk through the door. In this meeting we talk about what each of the TAs are doing in their respective classes and what we would like to do in the upcoming weeks. This is also a time to meet with Ivan (our advisor) about any other questions/problems in our Deauville life. 

1145am-135pm Recreation/Lunch with the Kids at Deauville

            Everyday we supervise recreation and lunch in Deauville. There are two services: the younger kids eat first while the older kids play and the second they switch. I always work the first service because I often leave before the second service is done eating to go to my next school to teach. At first the constat moving back and forth was difficult, but it keeps me attentive and engaged. This time always passes before you notice that it's gone.

2pm-245pm English with CE at Tourgieville

            After another commute I find myself in Tourgieville for the afternoon. I am only at this school 3 days a week because this school does not have class on Friday afternoons. To give them equal time in English class, the classes with this age group are adjusted to be 15 minutes longer each session. While they're the same age group as my morning class, we do not do the same content; the difficulty of the content and the way it is taught is similar but done throughout different periods. 

245-315pm English with GS/MS at Tourgieville 

            This is the youngest age group I work with, and admittedly the hardest to keep engaged. With the young ones you have to change what you're doing every three minutes or they lose interest. It's possible but it can be a challenge. 

4pm-5pm After School Activities 

            Once I have finished up at Tourgieville, I make my way back to Deauville to teach after school activities. On Monday I work with the CP, which is the youngest group at this school. Currently I do yoga inspired sport activities with them for about 45 minutes. The rest of the time they kids enjoy a snack that they bring from home.

5pm-6pm Homework Help

            The end of my everyday is spent in homework help. I work with the CM in Deauville/ I answer any questions they have and verify that they have finished their homework before the play. 

The homework is often French grammar or math. It's surprising to see how differently elementary education is taught here versus back home. Once it reaches six, we go home and there are still a few kids left who are supervised by an Animateur until 630 when the school closes. 

A Spooky Time in Deauville

             As we reach the end of October, an excitement rises in the air in the Deauville school system. In October there is the first vacation of the year: All Saint's Day Holiday Break. However, the break is not the cause of all of the excitement. Rather, the cause is a tradition that the children inherently link to our presence in Deauville as Americans. In Deauville, October with the Americans means time to celebrate Halloween.
            Right before the beginning of vacation the town hosts an after school Halloween event where all the kids and school employees dress up in costume, eat candy, and explore a haunted house. It's a very exciting night where everyone was able to have a lot of fun to get together and to celebrate after all the hard work we have all put in since the beginning of the school year.

 Barton carving pumpkins for the events

            Halloween in Deauville ends with this evening event, but it is far from the beginning. During the entire month of October Halloween is the subject in English class. At first glance, you might wonder how Halloween vocabulary could be useful enough to spend an entire month on; to my surprise there was little challenge finding useful applications.             

            Halloween is full of classroom ideas: you can count candy in English, learn the colors and names of all the costumes, learn simple emotions to express how costumes make you feel for example. In my classes, I was able to teach numbers using songs I found on youtube that count monsters with my youngest groups (Five Little Monsters ) and with my older group we learned all the different costumes and monsters you can dress up as. With the older kids you are able to play many games with only the use of flashcards that the children love. The classic game that we did with halloween vocabulary is to show them a set of flashcards, then put all of the images on the board, ask them to close their hides and then you remove one or two images and ask the kids "What's Missing?". Normally when I play this game I divide the class into two teams and it's almost surprising how often they ask if we can play that game again with our new content. 

 My personal masterpieces 

           As Halloween comes to an end, we are shifting gears to studying Thanksgiving and Christmas. Until then, during the time off Barton will be off to Scotland and London for the break, while I head down to Aix-en-Provence and then Tenerife to find my way to the sun. It's funny how fast Deauville began to feel like home, and how quickly I look forward for my upcoming months here. Until next time!

- Chase 

Your local neighborhood superhero

Our Arrival

Welcome all! Today marks two weeks since Barton and I have been in Deauville; we could not be happier to be here. I hope to provide you with a brief insight of our lives as TA's in Deauville.
      Reflecting back, it's crazy to think it's only been two weeks since our arrival. Only two weeks since we were descending the train and rolling our bags to the city. Upon our arrival, we were surprised to be welcomed by rows of 50 stars, red and white strips hanging on every street and our friend Aaron who did a summer internship through sister cities in Normandie. At the time I didn't think much of the flags-- we were tired from our trip: first to D.C to Iceland, then Paris and now Deauville. So we went to our house, settled in and took relaxing walks upon the beach to catch up with our friend.
     It wasn't until the next day when Ivan came to get us to set up our bank accounts that the mysterious rows of flags was clarified. At the beginning of September every year, Deauville hosts an American film festival, and we happen to be lucky enough to arrive just in the nick of time.
     On our first day Ivan walked us through what the next couple of weeks would look like: week one get acclimated to the four different school, week two begin to train and work solo with child, week three complete a training with the teachers of Deauville and week four begin teaching our classes.
On the first day, the idea of leading a class was a bit of a scary thought, but as time goes on you realize how much Ivan really helps you out.
     Yes, it's a lot of work. You plan your own lessons, you plan your own activities, you work the lunch times but you have even more preparation.
      When it comes to planning a class there is a lesson guideline to start the path followed by a multitude of resources at your disposal. We still have one week of training remaining, and there have already been enough resources and materials to feel comfortable going into your own English class.
     Activities are another story. Everyday the children do activities called APE, which are actives geared towards providing additional education in a fun way. Normally the activities come from the animateur's interests. Since I'm a yoga instructor back home, they thought it was only nature that my activity would be yoga.
     Continuing down the list of our responsibilities, the next one is working lunchtime à la cantine, except in France lunch is a class where we learn the rules of life. You're really there to make sure they learn the rules, as far as "working" the kids serve themselves and clean up their own messes.

     Everything I've described so far happens at the main primary school in Deauville, Fraccasse. So far this is where we have spent most of our time. Today, we did observations at the school for the youngest ones, l'école materinelle  Tomorrow we go to observe teachers in the other two schools in Tourgeville and St Arnoult.
     We have not yet decided who will be at which school, however we do know how it will work. One of us will be at Fraccasse with the older kids, another with the younger kids at Fraccasse as well as at materinelle, while the third one commutes to the other two schools that are few kilometers away( How far is that in miles again?)
     I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say about the schools once we have finished training. Until then thanks and I hope you've seen a little into our wonderful world in Deauville.


   

                                           Aaron and I on the beach the night we arrived

- Chase


   




 

The final countdown!

It's scary how time flies, and it's still hard for me to believe it's already June and that we'll all be leaving in a few short weeks. As the school year begins to wind down, we start wrapping up loose ends, begin reviewing what we've learned this year, and start to relax as summer quickly approaches.

As teachers, we continue to finish and great exams, organize papers, play review games, and also pick out who will get the english awards for each class. However, as APE instructors, we get to start wrapping up the activities, plan for next year's themes, and also prepare for the big spectacle at the end. Being in the last few weeks, it can kind of feel like you're going in a million different directions trying to sort through everything and start cleaning up. Luckily, our english classes will end the 29th, so we'll have a few days where we can organize the flash cards/worksheets and straighten up the rooms.

Of course, in a few weeks the moment will come when I have to say my final goodbyes to the kids, and I'm already anticipating a rather bittersweet moment. I know I'll hate to say goodbye, but I know at least that I'm leaving them better than they were originally, and I know I've done my job. Although it's sad, I know I'll definitely be back to France, and hopefully I'll even get to visit the kids some day. So, this isn't adieu, but rather à la prochaine.

Lesson Plans in Deauville

Hi, it's Rachael here for my final blog post for my time here in Deauville. It is bizarre to think I have less than two months left living and teaching in France. It is finally warm in Normandy, and flower boxes are once more filled with May flowers after quite a bit of April showers.

A view from the top floor of the Maison des Americans which we lovingly refer to as "The Tower"

The end of the year brings with it several celebrations. The animator team is organizing a family celebration to be held on France's Mother's day, where we will sing some songs and play a couple of games to honor the students and their families.

The students at Deauville and Saint Arnoult are also preparing to sing songs in English at the end of the year spectacle. There will be lots and lots of practice and repetition of songs in class before the big show.

With the end of the year, comes the end of our English lessons. We are given a curriculum guideline at the beginning of the year to follow, and this last period we have includes a lot of review. Since we have less material for the end of the year, we will be starting to conduct some story based lessons where classes will work with one story over the course of many lessons to review English and build their confidence from having completed an entire story in English.

The role of TAs in Deauville will be changing next year, but I thought I'd go ahead and give some of my favorite lesson plan ideas that could potentially be incorporated into next year's teaching.

1. I love using the whiteboard to tell stories. I usually take a story they recognize—like Goldielocks—and then change details along the way, such as the bears to penguins and the porridge to ice cream. The kids love it, because it's entertaining and its a great way to review vocabulary and keep everyone in English.

2. The "question hat" has become a part of our routines for the CE2 classes and up. It is literally just a hat with some lamented questions in it that students draw from and answer. Now they also pose their question to another student of their choosing. It's a quick and easy way to get everyone speaking in class. The students beg me before class to let them choose a question when I pull out the hat.

3. I love ending each class with a song. We usually work on one song over several weeks, and usually only learn the chorus. I only do this the last couple minutes of class, but the repetition over the weeks is typically enough for them to learn it. We start out just listening to the song, and then I have them sing it line by line repeating after me, and eventually we just sing with the song. My goal is that somewhere down the line years from now, one of my students will visit an English--speaking country and impress everyone by singing along with "Ring of Fire" and thank me for bringing some Cash into their lives.

4. Total Physical Response (TPR) is one of the most successful strategies I have used as a teacher. From preschool to high school, it is difficult to sit in those desks for so many hours and TPR lets students get up and move and make a kinesthetic connection to the vocabulary. If it is possible to use TPR with the vocabulary, we do it. To start, I call out the vocabulary term and act it out and the students repeat. Eventually, I just call out the term and they repeat it and act it out to show they recognize it, and finally, I let them quiz each other. Sometimes we also have competitions to see who knows the most.

Ultimately with lesson plans and activities you need to know your classes and students. Some activities work really well with one group of kids and totally flop with another. As teachers, we need to be prepared to be flexible and adjust instruction to fit the students' learning needs. My best advice is to differentiate your teaching, it may seem like more effort, but your students will be more engaged and learn so much more, which benefits them and you in the end.

Happy Planning!