First Lesson!

Things have been moving quickly around here. Sunday we had our group orientation in the afternoon. I ended up sleeping in beforehand so I didn't get to another museum, but for our orientation we went to Prague Castle and walked around and back down to Old Town Square. Prague Castle is the biggest castle in the world. I hadn't realized that I'd actually walked up to the castle the previous day in my wanderings; I had been right outside the gate. After the orientation we all went to a little pub and had a bite to eat. I shared an apple strudel with Alex P, which was divine. Our group is a really interesting mix of people. In addition to our group of US Citizens and Brits we also have an Australian, a Romanian, a Czech, a Canadian and a Finn. Sasha and I went to Tesco on the way home to pick up some more odds and ends we needed, then headed home to get a good night of sleep.

The group

St. Vitus Cathedral

Sasha, Mary Beth, me, and Marissa

Statues at the front gate

From the Charles Bridge

Monday was our first day of class. It was a long day. We started off with a survival Czech lesson, which served both to introduce us to some basic Czech and to give us the experience of being on the student side of a foreign language lesson. We spent the rest of the day talking about lesson planning and going over how to conduct a reading lesson. This came in handy because we were expected to teach our first lesson the very next day. We broke up into groups of two or three who would share a 45 minute lesson.

Today we actually taught our first lesson. There are several classes of adult students who come to our school to take inexpensive English lessons. They range from Elementary to Advanced in level. I am partnered with Sasha and Aiden, who is from Canada. Our class today was an Elementary level group. We were given the reading we were to cover in the class. We had composed our lesson plan and decided how to divide it up in class the previous day, and fine-tuned our parts that night. We had designed activities to get the students participating and talking. For our first class, it went very well. Our group was all women, and they were all friendly and having fun. We felt that the reading we had been assigned was a bit difficult for Elementary level learners, but I think we did a pretty good job of getting everyone to understand its meaning. Tomorrow we will teach a writing lesson. Today and tomorrow are meant to introduce us to teaching and help us become comfortable with being in front of the class, but we are not being evaluated yet. On Thursday and Friday, however, we will each be teaching a 45 minute class on our own and will be observed and evaluated.

We were done as soon as we finished teaching our class from 2:45-3:15 today, and I'm using the time to cook, blog, go over my part of tomorrow's lesson and work on my resume. I soaked some kidney beans overnight, and now I'm cooking them up with some brown rice. I'll be eating beans and rice with veggies and siracha sauce for the next few days. Yum.