English Class - Level 1
We've started our third and final theme in English Classes, and the little kids are thrilled to be learning all about Camping vocabulary! The hope is that they will be able to recall many of these words as they are on camping trips with their families and at campsites this summer. When choosing vocabulary words for a new theme, I pick from a wide range of words that typically includes people, animals, food, things, places, and verbs. This gives the students a wide variety of vocabulary that touches on many different topics within the one theme. I also include words that are the same of similar in Czech but with different English pronunciation as an encouragement. While most words are very different in English and Czech, there are many that are quite similar and when showing these kids those similarities, they look at me and say, "Oh, that's almost the same like in Czech! English is easy!" Which is exactly the kind of confidence I hope they gain in these English Lessons.
This theme includes 32 new vocabulary words. We learn four new words each week. So far, we have learned: lake, grill, tent, canoe, guitar, flashlight, sleeping bag, backpack, fishing, swimming, hiking, resting, camera, basket, mushroom, and berries. A few weeks about animals and insects are coming up this next month, which is always a favorite topic in this group! They are already trying to guess which animals will make an appearance on their Campsite Vocabulary Picture!
I've learned in the years of teaching that with this age, it is the simplest games that are the most fun (and the best for learning!) I've abandoned many multi-step games, and we play many of the same games but with different props, words, and actions. In this sense, many of the games feel "new" to the kids. Relay races with different items, circle games with various props; sometimes simply pointing out vocabulary words in different ways makes for a new fun activity! We can slap and say the words with flyswatters, run and stand next to the words, act out the words, and my new favorite in this theme was using mini-flashlights to "highlight" the words! With the lights off and the students focused on finding and repeating the words on their page, I was very impressed with how focused all the students were.
Nice weather has us once again making use of our terrace space! I love how great of friends all these kids are and the way they can be silly together.
English Class - Level 2
Czech tradition celebrates Easter on Monday. I have most of my Student English Classes on Monday, however, there is one class on Tuesday. Since I didn't want them to get ahead of the other Monday class (as it would be more difficult to plan and prepare on my end), and didn't want to cancel a perfectly good class-day for the Tuesday group, we added in a bonus lesson. As we have been learning about the Five Senses and finishing up smell and taste, it seemed the perfect opportunity to use the kitchen in our building to bake and decorate cupcakes! The kids worked together (with the help of a few leaders) to follow the recipe instructions. While the cupcakes cooked, the students created a "topping design" in their notebooks (I happened to have a perfect classroom set of these cupcake pictures and toppings stickers!). The students then had the chance to decorate their cupcakes! Whipped cream, chocolate, blueberries, and lots of sprinkles adorned the little treats. Everyone was super happy and left with satisfied bellies after class that day.
We've just wrapped up our theme about the Five Senses concluding with Feel. The students learned how to describe an object by the way it feels and guessed what was hidden inside paper bags and "balloon stress-balls." To review the theme, we had a Popcorn Party (yes, I've figured out the more you feed these kids, the happier and more focused they are...). They worked together to describe how the popcorn sounds, looks, feels, smells, and (our favorite) tastes! When pulling out the two bags of popcorn and explaining the activity to the students, I jokingly said, "Now, there are two bags, one for me and one for our translator. Don't worry, we will tell you how the popcorn tastes so you can write it down too." Some of the kids quickly caught on that I was teasing, though a few looked at me with puppy-sad eyes and one student (who has the sweetest, gentlest heart) said, "But how will we know if it is the same taste for you as it is for us? Perhaps we could just have a small taste..." Needless to say, we all enjoyed the popcorn and had fun using all the words from this theme to describe our full sensory lesson!
The layout of Monday and Tuesday English Classes is evident, as we are in different parts of the building for each group, but the learning is the same! It's so fun for me to see how comfortable these kids are in each setting.
This week, we started our final theme in the older English Classes: Vacation Trip! This is a theme I've wanted to repeat for a while, and it seemed like the perfect time. The kids are working together to create a book about a big adventure for Gerald and Piggie (a couple of our favorite book characters). We learned about different places (habitats) where they could visit and what animals they might see there. We had a big discussion about polar bears and penguins living on different poles of the earth as they often wanted to say penguins live in the arctic. Some of the kids really took that to heart and even sent their friends with polar bear cards to different sides of the room in one game when another had a penguin card. Then, one of my students placed a polar bear and penguin sticker on the same picture for her Gerald and Piggie story. When I said, "We talked about this! They won't be together." She shrugged and said, "Let's imagine the penguin flew to the arctic." I said, "Alright, you will have an imaginary vacation because not only are the polar bears and penguins together, but now the penguins are flying!"
Homeschool English Class
In Homeschool Class, the kids have been studying the rules of English Grammar and Sentence Structure. While we are continuing with some grammar themes, I interjected a lesson about Sports that prompted the students to use correct grammar in sentence structure. Most recently, our lessons included compound words and contractions - breaking apart compound words to try to identify their meaning (which can definitely be helpful in a foreign language!) and breaking down contractions to be able to identify the missing letters. Now that my class sizes have grown, I have been going back to the games and materials I have from when my class sizes were smaller and using up the extra materials with this homeschool group. It makes for many fun lessons, and they are often adding much of it to their notebooks to refer back to later.
(1) Turning the wheels so they statements all match the correct animal. (2) Using edible markers to write and break apart compound words on crackers!
Little Linguists
The toddlers have explored in many themes this past month! We sang songs and learned poems about Mountain Animals, Rain, Circles, Colors, and Dinosaurs. It has been especially fun for me these past weeks as the toddlers have been coming so regularly that their play often includes me as well. I adore the pretend phone conversations, receiving gallons of empty cups of "coffee", and watching as they play "Little Linguists" by holding babydolls like the moms hold the toddlers for our "hello" and "bye-bye" songs.
Confession: I often put up too many toddler pictures because, how can you resist those little smiles!?
I know I've said it before, but one of my favorite parts of teaching this Little Linguists class is giving moms more games and activities to have in their back pocket to entertain their little learners and enrich their exploration. While some of the toddlers are in a building phase, others are in a destroying phase, so as a teacher, I try to create different areas of the classroom where both types can thrive. Sometimes it takes more redirection, but I try not to say "no" after reading a toddler on average hears the word "no" 400 times a day. It begins to lose effectiveness when it is overused. Before restoring to "no throwing", I'll say "throw the ball into the ball pit!" Though there are many times that doesn't work, sometimes it is just the simple change of direction and the game can still be engaging and safe for the toddler.
Masks make the same toys a new territory! These forest animals found lots of play-food to open up their own "wild restaurant"!
Paint Circles
Dinosaur Exploration
While I am often in two locations for Kid's Club, I don't always remember to take pictures of what we are doing at each club. In our Boskovice Club, I have been enjoying the outdoor courtyard as we bump the volleyball around, and I'll ride my skateboard with some of the kids who come on their skateboards and scooters to club. With the high schoolers in Boskovice, I have found they like the challenge of foosball and enjoy playing rounds of darts.
In Letovice, the kids also enjoy foosball (it's a game you can't go wrong with in a preteen and teenage crowd). One little friend had a German exchange student for the week, and came saying, "I don't speak German, he doesn't speak Czech, and both our phones died so we cant use translator, but he can speak English! Can you help today?" Even though this student is in my English Classes, he was occasionally having trouble asking his new pal occasional questions (and even though I studied four years of German, I was also having trouble remembering my high school education). We found many games that didn't need much communication, though our favorite was a Nerf Battle! By the end of the day, my little student said, "Kendra, I've realized that most things can be said through charades!" I replied, "That's a lesson I learned many years ago."
Youth Group & Mission Church
Once again, I led Sunday School this month. While the first lesson I taught in the lesson sequence was around the question "why did Jesus need to die for us?", we have moved into a series of "Biblical heroes." I started a four week series about Daniel. Now, Daniel is a fun lesson to teach with the lions and his faith. There's even a fun "Sunday School" story in the book of Daniel about a fiery furnace and three brave boys with great faith, but we want to show the kids that faith comes in all areas of life and not just in large, death-threatening trials that then become Children's Bible Stories. So as we were starting this theme of Daniel, I got to teach on the boys' faith that God still knew them and saw them when they rejected the king's food and when they received new names. I shared with the students that all their names have meaning and their name can be worship to God, like Daniel (God is my Judge), Azariah (God Helps), Mishael (Who is like God?), and Hananiah (God is Gracious). We made nametags with our names and the meanings to remember that our names are a way we can worship God and live for Him. Some of the meanings included: God's Gift, Royalty, Strong, Unique, Raised by God, God Hears, Light, and Hard Worker.
As we are under the 10 week count-down to LetFest, our Summer Outreach, we met as a Mission Church and Youth Group to talk through some of the details about LetFest. Every year, I love seeing how each person has a part in the event to make it the best summer event for the kids in Letovice. Everyone is ready to step into their roles again this year!
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