Second long day, but my boss gave me my new schedule today and it is looking a lot better. Yes the lessons will be bunched up, but the day will be shorter.

I think that there was a slight break through today with the year two students.  They genuinely seem to be understanding a little more and one or two did beautiful sentences such as Its Ellie's green pencil.  I was so happy.    I even used the word for homework in Russian with them which they seemed to have understood, so it will be interesting to see if when I next see their workbooks whether they have managed anything.

Then I taught year one.   It is looking very beautiful here in the valley.  The shimmering leaves are still shimmying, but many are also falling.  I have realised in the last few years that I absolutely love the shape of trees and leaves, just the patterns that they make, and so now that I am a primary school teacher I just want the children to make collages with them. (Old adult students will remember a similar desire of mine when I taught them - interestingly one of them said that she remembered the word acorn because of this activity) Anyway I have been wondering up and down the highways and byways collecting wonderful seed heads and leaves.  I have also found potatoes, literally dropped off the back of lorries,  in the streets   which which to make potato prints.
Working out the right way to cut autumn gold was not as easy as I had hoped and I knew that the whole process would be difficult to orchestrate, but I could not resist trying it with year one this week. Year zero was hectic but just about feasible so I figured teaching the words and getting each year one student to stick a seed head or left to a bigger picture and for each of them to draw and colour in an apple or leaf should just about work.    I had of course not realised when I walked into the room and started though that the colleague with whom I usually teach this class was away - so it was do I back out or do I just try it.  Worse though was when I realised that while all the year zero children have glue (clay or something like that as it is called here) and all the year two students have glue,  only 2 of the 21 children in year one had so while a good few got the activity, fully engaged in it and fought so vehemently over the potatoes that I gave up printing after they had written Autumn (GOLD will have to wait for another time) the rest were spinning round the room mindlessly rather than merrily sticking things.  A definite fail had I been OFSTED'ed which was probably fair enough. But I was just glad to have survived and got something passable as an end product from them.

I was teaching in the after school class today who are about 15-19 years old and it was very interesting only talking to them about their family; only 1 had a living grandfather, who was 62, but 6 had living grandmothers. They were not sure why.

I had assumed I would be on my own tonight, but the Swedes have been replaced by Japanese and I have just had to google translate sorry but I do not drink beer.

Anyway time to retreat to my room and listen to Radio 4.