Paris :) and more

Wednesday June 13, 2012

First official day of school

Today was my first official day of school! We leave the house at 8 and arrive at our school around 9:00-9:10. The school is a religious school so the students are in assembly every morning until around 9:30. When they are released the students walk through the halls to their classes without any teacher observation and are not required to walk in a line. We did science all day. I found this odd because they did not have a set time for reading, writing and the other subjects. Well apparently the teachers chose to do a thematic unit of science for a few days because they did not want the students to forget the information over multiple days. I went outside for the students 20 minute play break and the teacher tea break in which students of all ages are playing together anywhere. I asked my teacher about this because in the states they do not play like this at all. Instead there are the separate playgrounds for separate age groups. Also most of the playground equipment they use is deemed unsafe. The teachers also get an hour lunch break. Another fact I found out about the school is that the lunch meals are made fresh daily using the ingredients from their garden and a snack is provided for a student and is normally an apple. A few of the unique names of the students that I have learned are Poppy, Eleanor, and Oliver.

We also had a meet and greet at a local college (well it took us about 30 minutes to walk there). My teacher attended and it was really more of a meet and greet for our instructors and interning teachers. I was hoping for some hot food but that didn’t happen!

Friday, June 15, 2012

Headed off to Paris!

Today at school the students were busy busy busy! They began with a science lesson on habitats and discussed how different organisms live in habitats and what not. Then we were off to swimming! The students more learn how to build up stamina and swim safely. As soon as we got back to the school we had about 25 minutes left for lunch. After lunch the school had organized an end or beginning version of the Olympic ceremony where the students went out front and three students from each year ran a relay and passed hand-made torches to each other. Then everyone gathered around the new flag pole as they watched a new flag raised by the principal. This was all scheduled last minute and all of the teachers just dropped what they were doing. As you can tell there was not a lot of teaching going on in my classroom.

The students also have golden time which is part of the discipline system in which the whole school participates in. This is when my teacher and I were able to sit down and plan a bit. I will be teaching two small group lessons and co-teaching a lesson with my teacher next week. Hopefully I will also be able to do a bit more but that is just what we have scheduled.

Well we found a decent deal to get to Paris and back. It leaves in about 40 minutes, luckily its leaving from a bus stop literally a 2 minute walk away. Somehow the boat goes over the channel and to Paris by tomorrow morning around 7. Then we will be taking the chunnel back Sunday night! Can you say busy!?!

Anyways you can read all about it Monday night-ish :)

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Oh Paris...

What an interesting city Paris was. Our transportation over was um... odd? We took a bus to a bus station in London, I think it was Victoria station where we lost track of time (like always) and ran to get our actual tickets and somehow got on the bus in time. Then we had to get off the bus at like midnight to go through customs, then back on the bus to drive onto the ferry, then off the bus to board the ferry, where we slept with ours heads on tables and bags close by. We somehow made it to Paris by bus the next morning and bought two day metro passes for 15 euros. We were also met with the lovely urine smell upon entering the metro of Paris and that made frequent visits throughout our trip. We immediately headed off to find our hotel, going to two wrong ones before finding ours. After throwing our stuff down we headed off to see the Eiffel Tower! This is when I first saw it, the view from our hotel balcony/window. 

And then when we were close and rounded a corner and it was so big!

I honestly was not up to going up it, all the stairs here in Europe are not fairing well with my knees and none of the other people seemed to be interested in going up so we just enjoyed taking pictures of it.

We then wandered because we were trying to find Notre Dame or the metro I think and came across the Pont Alexandre III

After walking across this and taking tons of photos we saw a few museums and made our way by the hidden metro to Notre Dame!

It was gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous and so gothic looking. This is my favorite part of visiting all of these places, the architecture. We also saw a bride and groom taking pictures outside of the Notre Dame.

While we were searching for a Metro to take back to our hotel I spotted a bookstore Brittany had been looking for the entire time, Shakespeare and Company. They were also having a live reading.

So we went back to our hotel to nap because 4 cranky girls in a city that speaks little English is not a good mix. We woke up around 9 and decided to go out and look at the Eiffel Tower lit up! It was gorgeous and we ate dinner where we could see it sparkle (which it does every hour for 5 minutes).

By the way, I ate crepes for breakfast, dinner and breakfast. I also shared a ham and cheese sandwich on a bagette with a friend :)

This morning we had to wake up early and check out and go to the Gare Du Nord because somehow we ended up with tickets going from London to Paris and needed tickets from Paris to London. Luckily they were nice enough to refund us our money and book us new ones. Therefore we only had 3 hours to explore the rest of Paris. We ate again and I tried my friends french onion soup which I thought was really good, surprisingly! Then wandered our way over to the Louvre but didn’t have enough time to go in :(

I am a little disappointed in our Paris trip because I wasn’t able to do anywhere near the amount of things I wanted to do in basically the day and a half we had. This obviously makes me nervous about my next two weekend trips but hopefully we will be able to organize/ plan these much better now that we have a general idea of our traveling abilities.

Here are a bunch of pictures and I need to go over a few lessons that I will be teaching this upcoming week! Wish me luck :)