Nicole's Days

Three cool things from today:

1. One of my students had a birthday party today that she has been, not-so-subtly, dropping hints about all week. We all gathered from a group picture of her in a pile presents with cake and trays of fruit and sung happy birthday. Her mother gave a the teachers a special box of 'walnut pies' which were really just walnuts and something like nutella baked inside pancake batter -amazing. The gifts continued throughout the day with orange juice from one mother, and sandwiches to finish the day from another. So I am well fed!

2. I had an awesome teaching moment with some of my older classes today. I was being introduced the website function that makes the tests for the students and I had noticed most questions were fill in the _______, using their vocabulary words. The class I had it quite smart with getting lessons from the book done and reading but they did not test so well. I tried some sample sentences on the board with the vocabulary words but no luck. To get a real picture of these words (already introduced in a story) I drew some goofy pictures on the board. For example, to explain the word row, I drew rows at a movie theatre. The drew students from the classes, one it the front row eating popcorn, one in the second row with his feet on the chair in front, one tossing popcorn at the screen in the third row, one actually watching the movie in the fourth. They loved it. For the words pointed and floppy we had gotten on the topic of unicorns and I drew a unicorn with a horn for pointed and then, based on one of the students ideas, a unicorn with a floppy horn dangling between his eyes. They loved it. We made p actions for all the words. Collar = two hands around your neck, cage = box around your head, straight = arms straight up in the air, curly=one leg curled up two arm curled over, pointed = unicorn horn, floppy = unicorn horn hanging down and many more. I first did the actions and all the students got into calling out the right word. Next they got up and had other students call out. Next class I want to focus on how the know which word to put in the sentence now that I am confident they know exactly what each word means.

3. I had a couple free classes where I finally submitted a bio and a photo to be put up on the school website. I submitted my bio like this:
"Hello, my name is Niki. I am from Canada and I'm so excited to be here. I love travelling, so I completed my university degree in Australia. I like learning and teaching languages. In the past, I taught English to children and adults in Ghana. I'm so happy to be in Ansan teaching at Poly School."
But it got edited to Nicole! They had talked about me as Nicole before I got there so it seems quite ingrained with the staff -the students however have been calling me Niki Teacher which is more important anyways.