The usual highs and lows.

Had a rather horrid flashback today, when the teacher went out of the room and left me with students who I thought had been doing their English alphabet revision and so I handed out my big alphabet but prior to this photo being taken the excited response to it, was utter chaos.

Much more successful was my bag of rubbish. I may have lost my clothes on route, but my bag of rubbish survived in my hand luggae, bits of packaging that I thought the children might like e.g. tea, coffee, oranges. Year three have already been doing some language around buying food so this was for a bit of realia revision. They wrote shopping lists or their products out and bought and sold - a very nice way to end the week.

Not so successful Year 1 have completely forgotten, Two Little Dickie Birds and 5 Little Ducks, but they very quickly picked up the key themes in the book Walking Through the Jungle which I did with Year 1 last year.  Its lovely pictures really captivate them. I did an extra lesson with some of the year two students in preparation of them doing some work around Handa's Surprise - four girls came and helped me paint a nice big version of the title page. It was so peaceful working with them. They really thought about the colours and it is only today I realise how easy it was communicating in English what they had to do.  Today they have started to enact it and I am trying to encourage the local teacher to have the confidence to put it on with them at the end of term. She has not been putting on events each term and while the teaching seems to have been good if not very good, the place of English in the curriculum and in the school seems to have suffered a bit without me making sure it is always visible and audible.

Sadly my attempts to introduce compost or land enrichment have totally failed and no time now to follow up on this or energy.  However, it was a lovely sunny day today. All has settled down well at the school Tomorrow there is a ceremony to celebrate the children in year one having learned their Russian alphabet and in theory at about the same time my head and I are supposed to be meeting up with some of the after school children that we taught.