It was back to work after a day of sightseeing. We had planned a group study session so I met up with my tecahing practice group at one of their houses and we settled in for an afternoon of work... trying to turn a play into a successful, exciting lesson incorporating four seperate skill-based activities which turned out to be easier said than done. Renate volunteered to read us the play which she did with great gusto, reading the stage instruction and all the parts, including the parrot. Her parrot impression was so impressive even the noisy neighbours stopped talking in order to listen! After deeming our lesson plan 'good enough' we parted ways. I stayed on with Francesca, Luciana and Jade and the four of us set off to see the beach! It was again ... read more

It has been a challenging week. We've all work exceptionally hard and are certainly ready for the weekend! I don't think I can really afford to take a whole day off to go sightseeing tomorrow but I'm going to! I need to do something other than obsessing about lesson plans and sitting up at 2am worrying about grammer and phonetics! :( Still it hasn't been all bad. We had a full two hours of unassessed teaching practice this morning which was basically our chance to relax and have fun with the kids (as well as finding out how much they've learnt over the last two weeks!) We got the kids to create their own character - we had a strange mix of popstars, princesses, snowmen and superheroes. They all made a poster and wrote sentences to ... read more

Well I have made it through my first week on the CELTYL course!! I have enjoyed my first week although it has been a lot of hard work. I am lucky enough to be living fairly close to International House - it only takes about 10 minutes to get here every morning which is great. There are 9 of us on the course altogether and we are quite the multi-cultural bunch. We are ranging in age from 21-50 and are from England, England again, England but living in Switzerland, England but living in Spain, Ireland but currently living in Spain, half American half Swiss, Italian, Argentinian but living in Sweden, New Zealand but living in Switzerland!! Everyone on the course is really nice and we´ve had a lot of fun together so far. The work is ... read more

Well I leave for Barcelona tomorrow morning. I have to get up at the ridiculous time of 4am but I guess it's all for the good as I'll arrive in Spain in the afternoon which should give me some time to get my bearings and locate International House!!! I am currently in the process of repacking and double checking everything!!! ... read more

Ok, well in theory a trip to Disneyland was the perfect way to end my visit in California. In practice it turned out to be quite a challenge. I woke up on Monday to find keely in quite a state. Her car had been vandalised and a huge rock sat on the back seat while the the back windscreen was completely smashed and the other back windows had obviously been hit with the same rock. Keely furiously blamed it on our druken visitor from the previous night but nothing could be proved. A policeman turned up to take our statements about what we knew about the car incident... which wasn't much. He obviously assumed the two of us were living there together because he looked very nonplussed when I opened my mouth and spoke in an ... read more