My first week of teaching

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Dear all,

today is Friday, 19.08. I just came down from the mountains in the pick up truck and realised that my first week of teaching is over! After a few very cold days, we had lots of sun today and the journey through the mountains to and from school was simply beautiful. This journey will probably be the most scenic way to work I will ever have in my life!

Looking back, this week has been quite challenging at times but I have learned a lot. I am a little disappointed that we have not had more than 1o kids per day, but hopefully Nicola and I will be able to build up the number of children attending school over the next few weeks. In my opinion, the few kids we had this week have learned many things: sitting on a chair rather than lying across the table, working with a partner, saying "gracias" and "por favor", using the bin for rubbish and memorizing a few English animal names. I guess the big advantage of having so few children is that they concentrate for longer on their work. I tried to teach two of the boys (aged 10 and 11) some basic subtraction this morning along the lines of "Cuanto es 20 menos 5"? Quite a challenge...

..as was our second teaching day. Whilst having lunch outside, the wind closed the door and we were all stuck outside - everything, including the spare key to the school, was inside the classroom. After having tried to open the door by throwing ourselves against it, Nicola and I simply had to wait for two hours for the pick up truck to take us home...or so we thought! The wind had also opened the window furthest away from the door, but since there are iron bars in front of every window we didn't see much point in investigating. Luckily, our smarties Humberto and Christiano decided to do differently. They managed to fish a broomstick through the iron bars and what followed then was almost incredible. They managed to open every window along the wall (using the broomstick) and finally managed to turn the inside handle of the door (again with the broomstick, how is that possible?) and the door opened!!! Those kids are simply great! We were all jumping up and down with joy and our two heroes were rewarded with lots of stickers and few piggy back rides around the school building. I feel like taking problem solving lessons from those two!!

I am looking foward to a relaxing weekend now after a week of dealing with kids, cows and closed doors! Lots of love from Urcusiquie, Steffi x

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Photos

all boys day
As we currently have different children coming to school every day,the odd "all boys day" is not unusual.Lots of competitive activities, please!

Travelling to school
Can you now believe how cold it is on the truck?

Magnetic numbers from the 1 pound shop in London
The magnetic numbers and letters are definitely one of the main attractions of the day!