Hans Christian Anderson Inspiration

Nothing really too exciting happened over my class filled weekends. Weekends at EF are super busy and most teachers are pretty zombie like at the end of the weekend after the ten plus hour days of teaching. I mean, I have to admit, I got a pretty good gig going here. I usually only work about six to seven hours on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, but they get us on Saturday and Sundays.

I had two really awesome classes this weekend. One was my favorite small stars Saturday morning class that I've written about several times before. It was a special "life club" class where the curriculum is usually a bit more relaxed, but it involves using the puppets a bit more. In this class, Roddy's mom gives him a new pencil that he takes to school and one of the other animal friend puppets steals it away from him. Rodddy and the kids in the class have to become detectives in order to find the pencils. We took a field trip around the school trying to find the pencils and after they were found, all the students got their own Roddy pencil. They were pretty psyched about it.

Today, I had my highest level class where I was scheduled to talk about Scandinavia. I'm getting schooled in my utter lack of knowledge about geography in this job. All I really know about Scandinavia comes from a little history about the Vikings and Conan O'Brien's trip to Finland. I had some research to do.

Luckily, I learned in my research that Hans Christian Anderson hailed from Denmark and I thought it would be fun to do a writing workshop with this class. We spent the first hour learning about Scandinavia and we started the workshop in the second hour. We read "The Princess and the Pea" and talked about important aspects of fairy tales. Then, I tried to teach the students quickly about the concepts of "brainstorming" and "concept mapping" before writing a story. I told them that we would come up with an example concept map of a fairy tale. It turned out to be this ridiculously awesome story about me being a Queen and that a few of the students were my daughters who fell in love with my long lost son. It was pretty awesome. My "homework" is to write that story and their homework was to write a rough draft of their own fairy tale. I can't wait to hear about what they come back with next weekend.

Captain's Log: 18 Weeks

Plus, I had my four month anniversary with this city on Tuesday. I've already completed one-third of my contract!