March 15th, The Final Day

For our final week at blue ash elementary, we decided to scale back our lesson plan and keep, what I call, simple. Last week, we divided up the regions that speak French based upon which continent they were on and each chose one. I myself chose the great North America, and talk mainly about Canada. I chose to talk about Canada mainly because I felt that since we lived so close to Canada that the kids should at least know were it was located at. I also thought since the winter Olympic happened not to long ago that they would at least know that. So, I had them color a flag, and if we had time I would look at a map of Canada, but must of the time we didn’t get to the map. The main thing I tried to enforce to the kids that Canada is a French speaking country and really isn’t that far away.
Overall, the attendance was down this past week and that surprisingly made the behavior worlds better than the week before. I was kind of sad the some of the kids didn’t to come to the party. Oh yeah, after our lessons we had a party in which we served French style cuisine (bread, cheese, cookies etc…). The kids really enjoyed this part, and were surprisingly well behaved. I think it was because we had the power to take the food away, but unknown to them we had no intention of doing that. We had planned to may give out a certificate or something like that but we forgot. We gave them their books and C.D. and said the final “Au revoir” and sent them on their ways. Hopefully it made a difference.

For the final time, Ben signing off.

March 8th

This week at Blue Ash Elementary, we tried to teach the kids about basic food Phrases, in French, as well as basic clothing phrases. I say tried, because I feel that we didn’t get through to the kids week. I feel that I spent most of my time this week just controlling kids and making sure that they didn’t play in the bathroom. Darn kindergarten Bathroom. This week we all decided to abandon the stations and just engage the kids all at the same time. To me, this was one of our biggest failures because we all were teaching the same thing at the same time so that we ran out of things to teach. I feel that the group rotations would have made the whole day better. I hope that nest week they will be a lot better behaved because we are going to bring food and the last thing that I want to do on Monday is have to extreme clean the whole kindergarten room. I also think that we didn’t plan enough to do this past week and that came back to bite us in our face. I was also disappointed that the fashion show didn’t turn out better.

March 1st

This past Monday was a whole different experience. I found that the student had a lot of excess energy that made it hard for them to focus on some of the less interesting topic. This past week we choose to teach month, days, and weather. I particularly choose to instruct the students in the art of weather. I found that this week they had a harder time paying attention to what I was talking about. I think that it had something to do with the fact that it was the end of the day. The way I tried to teach this topic was through the use of cut little artistic renditions of the weather that I made in my spare time. I also decide to have them do a rain dance in order to get some activity into the lesson plan. During the rain dance, I found it very hard to keep the students attention, because they were focused more on how all of their friends were acting. One thing that I noticed when I was performing the rain dance was how the other groups became distracted by our activity. So what I was think was maybe we should try to incorporate a second game that they other group can do at the same time I think that this will help limit the distraction on the other group if both groups are doing something interesting.
Ben signin' off