April 2024

 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

Kid's Club

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!

March 2024

English Class - Level 1

We have finished our theme about the City!  The kids are so excited to show off all they have learned and they are very proud of all their work - as they should be.  As we were reviewing all the vocabulary the last day, I quickly noticed one of my students helping his friends by giving them the starting letter for words they couldn't remember.  When we finish a theme, I take the students individually for an assessment to see how many words they can recall from the theme.  I told this student, "I'd like you to go first."  He looked at me really surprised and a bit hesitant, and I said, "Let's just try," and with some encouragement from his friends, he began the assessment.  He recited all 32 words and I said, "That's it! You got them all!"  He looked at me with saucer-wide eyes, "I finished?!"  His friends came over patting him on the back and applauding his hard work, and I had the greatest joy watching as he fist-pumped the air.  When the class ended, this student's mom called saying, "My son texted me that he got all the words right on the recitation?" I replied, "You have a very talented, hard-working son.  He should be so proud of himself for recalling all 32 words.  I am very proud of all his work."  I love being encouragement for these kids (and parents!), knowing some of my students have a hard time in traditional school settings, it is an honor to show them that they really are clever, talented learners.  Average for the assessment was 25 remembered words with 9 of the students getting perfect scores.

In our City vocabulary this month, we learned some animals we might see in the city, traveling areas (street, sidewalk, etc.), things at a park, and community helpers.  I really made sure that in this theme the students still had a variety of new vocabulary words and not simply names of buildings in the city.  It created for many different games and lots of ways for them to connect their new vocabulary with their lives.

Spring weather is giving us the chance for games on the patio again!  Those smiles to be out in the sun are plain to see. 

One of our favorite games this month was called "Statues!"  Students made statue poses (some of the kids even worked together to create group statue poses!) and one student would look for a statue who isn't staying perfectly still, say "statue" (one of our vocabulary words) and change places.  I was impressed with their frozen creativity, and translators and I loved the nearly silent, active game!

English Class - Level 2

The older English Class students have been continuing in their theme about the Five Senses with a few of my favorites, taste and smell!  Taste is never a complete theme without taste testing American Jelly Beans!  There are a couple kids in both of the classes that really loved the spicy Jelly Bean flavors and I was happy I had a pack of Hot Tamales to divide up between the students.  Cinnamon flavored candies aren't popular in Czech, so for the kids who like that spicy kick, it was definitely a treat!

The American Menus are filled with pictures, which isn't typical in a Czech restaurant, and the kids had a lot of fun looking at what food was being served at this American restaurant.  The retired menus were from 15 years ago, and the students all commented, "you could get a brownie and ice cream for a dollar?!  When can we go?!"  I showed them the print of the menus was 15 years ago and that certainly inflation has changed the prices and time has changed the menus, but they thought it was super cool to have real American menus in their hands.

The lessons on Smell was filled with smelly markers and scratch-and-sniff stickers (which I also bring special from America for this purpose).  Their notebooks are filled with lots of different smells, and now it isn't abnormal to see the kids with their faces laid atop their notebooks - not because they are bored in class, but because they are smelling all their stickers!

The students had a mix-and-match food erasers activity and then described how it would taste.  When taking pictures, I said, "imagine how your creation would taste!"  Needless to say, icing on bread with strawberries would taste okay (picture 1)... french fries in a an ice cream cone may not be making it on a menu anytime soon (picture 2)!

Homeschool English Class

We have been working through different English grammar rules and exceptions in our Homeschool English Group - which can be a daunting task, but these students are actively working to understanding the concepts.  I am seeing that their reading fluency is becoming more confident and quicker as they have a wide range of memorized vocabulary and now sounding out words they don't know with correct English phonetics.  After a few weeks on English phonetics (which could be studied the whole school year and still not completed), we moved on to parts of speech as we looked for nouns in sentences and stories.  

I'm always so proud of their efforts in English Class.  Since there is some range in the level of English understanding in this class, I try to find activities that challenge the higher-level students and are still accessible in understanding for the lower-level students.  They are all such hard-workers (typically), that it isn't hard to keep the group moving forward.

Little Linguists

The toddler class has been growing rapidly!  One week we had 16 toddlers running around the room, plus all the parents - I am so glad it doesn't feel crowded as the space is large enough to accommodate all the little, running feet.  Over this month, our themes were Boats, Fruit Salad, Hats, and Hop!  We had fun seeing different colored fish from our boat and collecting treasures.  A couple of the toddlers and I made a boat with the MegaLegos and went on a boating trip.  One of the moms began throwing the stuffed animal fish in the boat saying they were jumping in the boat!  The toddler quickly grabbed the fish and hugged them tight declaring, "I'll save them!"  She was convinced holding onto the fish in the boat was "saving" the fish... and no one had the heart to tell her as she tightly gripped the stuffed fish so they wouldn't fall back into the "water."  

There was lots of cooking in the play kitchens in our theme about Fruit Salad.  The kids decorated paper plates with lots of fruit stickers.  We had many funny hats to try on with our Hat theme, and the toddlers loved putting hats on moms and aunties too.  The American hats are always my favorites, though the toddlers seem to appreciate the crowns, cowboy hats, and knight helmets just as much.

Our lesson titled Hop is always my favorite to do around Easter as hop like bunnies (and frogs, kangaroos, grasshoppers, and everything else that hops!).  We jumped everywhere, played with bouncy balls, and skipped plastic frogs in the air.  I even had a set of plastic Easter eggs and a basket, and we practiced hopping around to collect eggs with a bunny stuffed animal in tow.

There's always something special about storytime, and we had lots of fun seeing if this little mouse would be able to hide the strawberry!  The toddlers loved finding the strawberry on every page and laughing at the ways the little mouse tried to hide it.

The bill of the cap continued to fall over her eyes, so I spun the hat backwards on her head and said "Go see how you look in the mirror!"  This toddler walked backwards all the way to the mirror so that the hat would "face forward"! 

Kid's Club

Sometimes it's the mundane games that are the most fun.  BINGO is one these kids can play for hours nearly every club, and they still love sitting together and playing.  It is one of those games that doesn't take much concentration, is based on luck, and when there are little American candies for the winner, the games go by pretty quick.  After long days at school and studying for exams, these kids want to do something together but not too active, and BINGO just hits right. 

The creativity of the little boys at club is always my favorite to see.  They come up with their own games and enjoy including me in their play.  Sometimes I get to play the fourth person in foosball or jump in during dodgeball, and other times they want me to just capture their creations as they show it off.  We have had many of the girls start coming more regularly.  They are often giggly and love dancing!  I am also very glad they have a safe place to come to as some of the students we work with have hard times with relationships in school.  It is encouraging that they connect with the leaders at Kid's Club and can chat through some of life's deeper middle school problems.  

Mission Church & Youth Group

Starting this new year, one of my goals was to begin leading Sunday School.  Since I work with kids every other day of the week, I always took Sundays to rest from work with kids, but more and more God continued to put these kids on my heart.  Many of them are in my English Classes and most of them I have known their whole life, so I already have the foundational connection with them.  I convinced another leader to join me in co-teaching, and we were ready to start teaching once a month on our little Mission Church rotation.  Except I was sick last month when we were supposed to teach about Jesus healing the paralyzed man.  So, our first official lesson was this month.  The theme - why did Jesus have to suffer for our sins?  Oof!  Big theme for a first lesson, but we knew the kids could handle a big theme if we could manage teaching it.  We looked at Jesus' time in the Garden of Gethsemane and talked through what was happening.  One of the students (an 8-year-old) said, "wouldn't it be crazy if one of the men who arrested Jesus later believed him?"  I quickly jumped in my Bible to the centurion at the foot of the cross who declares, "surely He is the son of God."  Another student in the class wrestled with this thought, openly saying, "I know Jesus died for everyone... even the men who killed him... but that just doesn't seem fair."  We talked through this big theme and made a string of hearts that say "God heals my broken heart." 

We joined Mission Church and Youth Group together this week on Thursday evening for a Seder Meal as Jesus would have had on Passover.  We went through all the different symbolism of the food and tradition of the meal and how it relates to us now in our walk as Christians.

Outreach

When I added a fourth Elementary English Class to my regular weekly commitment, I decided to cut out school visits.  Many schools in the area invite me as native speaker for holidays and special culture lessons.  Over the years, I have developed a running list of holiday and culture lessons that are appropriate for different English levels to encourage their English progress.  One of the things I've noticed is that it can be hard to gage how the class will respond to different activities and engagement in the lesson as they are unfamiliar with me.  So when one dear friend of mine invited me to her village school, I knew I could make the exception - I think I knew half the school already!  A good few handfuls of the kids attend my regular English Classes.  I taught three lessons and taught the entire school, 1st-5th grade!  The youngest group had a lesson about Easter and the older two groups about American Culture.  Even weeks later, a child from the youngest class saw me in a different setting and enveloping me in a hug declared, "I still know the word 'bunny' from the Easter lesson!"

One of my students - who has been attending my English Class for years - had her premier in translating the younger class!  I was so proud of her!  Only a 5th grader, but she has incredible skill and talent, and I was most impressed with her teaching voice!  Many of my first-time translators need help to find their voice as they are shy and nervous.  Even though I could tell she was nervous, she projected her voice with confidence and didn't take her eyes off of me.  I nearly bubbled over with joy as after all the years of teaching her confidence to speak in English, she exactly as I knew she could!

Easter & Friends

The Catholic Church in town puts on a performance of Jesus' life to celebrate Easter.  It is always a wonderful way to go into the Easter weekend, and it is their second year of doing this performance.  The performance finishes with Pilate and his wife, discussing his decision, and though the crucifixion is mentioned, it is only shown through the questioning of one of the women to a Pharisee teacher.  What I really like about this performance is that at the end, the organizers get on stage and explain that there is more to the story and to visit any church this upcoming Sunday to hear the rest of the story.  I think it is a magnificent way to share the story of Jesus' life and encourage people to come to church on Sunday.

Many of my students and friends had roles in the performance.

One of my Easter Traditions is going spend the holiday with some American Missionary Friends and their kids!  The kids and I have been waiting excitedly to see each other again, and the weekend was filled with Easter activities (decorating treats & eggs, an egg hunt, Good Friday and Easter Day services, etc.) and, of course many games and reading lots of stories.

Some English-speaking friends and I have recently started a bookclub.  We enjoy calling in each month and even made a day-trip to Prague to meet in person.  It is a feat as many of us live all around the country, though I was greatly encouraged by these women and very encouraged by the literature we are discussing!