Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Twenty-four blue sweat suits!

I walked into a classroom today at 2:30pm to be greeted by 24 eager Chinese faces, all waiting to learn more English.  They were all outfitted in royal blue sweat suits with 2 white stripes down each side.  Quite a sight, they all looked very smart! I wished I had my camera but it would probably be inappropriate to be snapping pictures on the first day.  Maybe my second!

My lesson plan consisted of teaching the usage of "any" vs. "some", and telling a story of when I bought my first car, and testing for listening comprehension.  I also used a tennis ball to toss to each speaker so that it was clear who was to speak.

I also listed facts about myself:

39 (my age)

3 (the number of kids)

1 (the number of siblings I have)

... as well as many more.  I asked them to come up with questions that matched the answers I listed.  When we got to the "1", the question they came up with was "How many wives do you have?"

It was a lot of fun,but it takes way more time to come up with an interesting lesson plan than the 40 minutes that you spend giving it in class!  I was a little short of material, so next time I will need to prepare a bit more.

Meanwhile, Sue stayed home with the kids and took them to the bank and she went out to coffee with one of her girlfriends who is another teacher.  I haven't found a cash machine where my debit card would work yet, so I was getting a bit anxious about our cash situation - since EVERYTHING is in cash here.  Luckily, the bank that Sue visited today works with our debit cards and we were able to withdraw some much needed cash!

Tonight, we ate a quick dinner and dashed off to the Shanghai acrobats. Here's Jack posing with a statue in the lobby.

  Shanghai 032

The acrobats were of course incredible. It was a great show of what you'd expect; contorting, dancing, juggling, knife throwing, balancing, death defying acrobats!  I couldn't take too many pictures because I didn't think we were supposed to; mostly because of the announcement in several languages not to take pictures.  These somehow snuck into my camera anyway!

Shanghai 029

Shanghai 019 Shanghai 024  Shanghai 030 

This building we saw on the way home, and I thought it was very interesting looking! A giant Borg space ship!

Shanghai 035

Tomorrow is Sue's 2nd try at teaching, so back to lesson planning we go!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Teachers! So proud of you! What a great experience for the students and for you!! I'm glad you found an ATM that works. we had that trouble in Europe too until I remembered we had a withdrawl limit of $200 per day. So I had to calculate what that meant in the new currency and managed to get cash OK. We are so thrilled with your blog. It is truly my daily news source. Thanks for the great photos & stories. What an amazing way to capture your life there. We miss you sooooooo much!
Love,
The Mahers