Kindergarten

This morning we had cereal for breakfast. I’ve never been a fan of corn flakes and the milk may have tasted different, but it was nice to have something familiar other than toast or pancakes. Although I am loving having pancakes and toast instead of rice.

Today I had a few exciting lessons. In my G.12 class I had prepared a PowerPoint of celebrity faces. This was so that the students could use the vocabulary about detailed appearance and describe the celebrities in detail. It was a fun way to start the lesson as they knew most of the people apart from Benedict Cumberbatch and J.K. Rowling, and they only vaguely recognised Prince Harry. But they recognised Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Barrack Obama easily enough. I used it to teach them the difference between light, pale and dark colours in regards to eyes and hair. It was also useful to revise words such as moustache and beard. I only had six celebrities but when I said that was the end, they said they wanted to describe more people. So I think I’ll use mixed media for future lessons.

I then read the description of Harry Potter from my copy of the book and asked them questions about his description. I read through the passage once, then wrote the questions on the board and read the passage out twice after that. I would have read and written up questions for Dumbledore’s character description but they wanted to play a game instead. So we played Pictionary to revise some of the more difficult descriptive words. It was quite funny trying to describe the word without letting the rest of the class know what the word was!

Before lunch we had Kindergarten activity. This is our first time doing anything with the Kindergarten as we were busy with school trips, or the students were taking naps on earlier Fridays. We were told there were only going to be fifty students in our class today, but they’re so small that they took up the same amount of space as half of my G.10s. We went through the alphabet song with them. They got bored with it quickly, but enjoyed the actions that went with some of the letters, such as C for cat and V for van. We then did some more songs with the students. The teachers helped us usher them into a big circle and we sang the hokey-pokey. It took them a little while to get the actions (even with Eilidh and Kate standing in the middle for the first part). They loved rushing into the middle and back out again. It was quite funny seeing them throw themselves whole heartedly into the actions. We then sang head, shoulders, knees and toes. We didn’t get round to going faster or doing blanks, but it was great to hear the children singing along. It also gave us a good idea of their English level. I think next week we might sing Old Macdonald and focus on animal vocabulary.

This was our first full school week since we started, so I was really glad to get to the end of it. Hannah and I celebrated by opening the bottle of coke that had been sat in our room, waiting for a movie night or tiring day. As much as we were getting up really early on Saturday, it was good to relax and stay up a little later.