Day 2

Whew. I just got home from the second day of classes, plus Spanish for adults and walking home for half an hour from the late bus stop. What a day!

The kids were much better at remembering to speak only English today - no one did more than twice. I read them Cinderella (the Grimms' version) and they enjoyed talking about the similarities and differences between it and the movie and between it and Rough-Face Girl. Sairy hugely complemented my read-aloud prowess, asking me to keep reading even after I had used up the "official" time for read-aloud (Cinderella is kind of long) - and letting me do my discussion afterwards, so my 20-minute read-aloud became a 40-minute read-aloud and discussion. Tomorrow I'll be reading Yeh-Shen, a Chinese Cinderella Story and we'll be comparing and contrasting all three. These kids really like being read to, and though some of them got distracted and were coloring on notebooks (I noticed and had them stop before I would continue), most of them remembered interesting details from the story when we were talking about it later.

I watched Sairy teach math today, and she really made it easy for the kids by starting with very simple numbers. They are learning place value to the hundred thousands (they already know to hundreds, I think), and she started by having them read numbers like 4, and 67, and 325. Just read them aloud. I think it gave the kids a really positive beginning to the lesson, because everyone could do that. She really emphasized that math can be hard, but she wants to make it easy. One girl came up with "Everything is easy, once you know how to do it." I think I'll keep that quote.

After school, I went to the adult Spanish class. The Wednesday class is Level 4, the Monday class is Level 1. With my background, I'm not a Level 1, so I'm in this class. The teacher reviewed 4 tenses in an hour, going over all the irregular forms - she's reviewing the first 3 levels in the first two weeks of class. I understood probably 95-99% of what she said, which was good, but I didn't remember everything she talked about. Or rather, I remembered, but not until she wrote it down. I didn't come up with much when she asked for examples. I think it is the right class for me, though it might be tough at times.