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Published: March 27th 2006
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One of my friends and I in front of the Prado art museum Hey everyone! I hope that yall had a great spring break! What did everyone do? Things have been crazy here for me, but this weekend I got to relax quite a bit which was so nice and very much needed! Here's an update of what has been going on.
MADRID: Last weekend I went to Madrid for a day/night with 2 other girls from Indiana that I am here with. We took the hour and a half train ride from Avila to Madrid Saturday morning. When we got there we wondered around for a bit. We found a cheap, nice hostel to stay in for that night, put all our stuff down, and then headed out to explore Madrid. There was a ton of shopping, which I loved and took advantage of a little bit! We then went to the Prado, the famous art museum. It was pretty cool to be walking around in one of the world's top art museums. It was also neat to see art work from artists that I have learned about since I started taking Spanish classes. The piece of art that I enjoyed seeing the most was a painting called "Las Meninas" by Diego
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Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez Velazquez. It is a painting of the children of King Felipe IV who lived back in 1600's. Saturday night, we met up with our friend who student taught in Avila last semester and loved Spain so much that she moved to Madrid. She is now teaching English there. We went out for tapas, which are basically like appetizers and consist of food such as fried calamari, bread, ham, and cheese. Sunday we picked up our friend from the airport that is also here to student teach. So in all, there are 4 of us in Avila.
SCHOOL: This past week at school was an interesting one. I love being at school because it is the place that I get to practice using and hearing Spanish the most. My Spanish has improved immensely since I have been here, but I still have a ways to go! My teacher assigned me two classes to teach last Monday after I had only been there for 4 days. It was very challenging to teach some in English, but mostly in Spanish! My brain was dead on Monday evening. As the week went on though, it started to get easier. The students are very
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Puerta del Sol well behaved for the most part. There are the occasional class clowns, but all in all, they are great kids! They joke around and talk just like yall do (except in Spanish). There are some differences between the school here in Avila and the schools back in the United States
- The kids call the teachers by their first names
- The notebooks and paper that the kids write on are graph paper, not lined like in the US. I find it hard to write in
a straight line on the graph paper, but the kids write extremely well...which leads to another observation...
- Students learn how to write in cursive in kindergarten. Everyone here writes in cursive and its perfect writing.
First graders have better hand writing than I do! I am not exagerrating!
- They write their "p," and "f" differently from us. They do not connect the "p" at the bottom, so in a way, it looks
like an h, but with the stick at the bottom. The f's have a loop on each side, not on one side like ours do. It's a
bit difficult
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My coordinating teacher, Reyes, and me to explain what it looks like on a computer.
- The students go to school from 9:30-12:30 and then 3:30-5:30. I almost think that this is better because it gives
the kids and teachers a break in the middle of the day. They aren't as antsy toward the end of the day because
they haven't been at school for the past 7 hours. Also, I don't know how they get everything done in 5 hours,
but they do. I'm still trying to figure that one out...
- This is a random observation, but the erasers that they use to erase the chalkboard are sponges (dry, not wet)
and it erases the board extremely well. It doesn't leave behind that dusty chalk stuff. Also, the texture of the
board is different, so this might be part of the reason that the board erases so nicely.
I have a lot of new pictures from Avila, but since the website takes about 2 minutes per picture to upload, I'm going to wait till it's not so late at night here! I do want to let yall know though that I am going
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A few kids in 5th grade to Prague, Czech Republic (we didn't get to study this) and Switzerland (mainly Zurich) in about 2 weeks for Easter break! I'm very excited about this! I will be sure to write more soon!
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