We Interrupt This Broadcast...

...to bring you a public service announcement: I've been crazy busy!!! I'm very sorry for the commercial break right in the middle of my Italy stories, but I just need to explain why I've had to put that on a brief pause.

With our second session of classes starting on Monday, Emily and I held two days of registration this week and two days of orientation meetings. All of our spare time was used for creating schedules, sending students messages about meeting times and class times, preparing materials, prepping for lessons, and just generally getting organized for another session of classes.

We had 16 new people register for classes and it looks like we'll be able to fit all but one into the schedule. And only two people couldn't return to classes so we're still up 13 students. We even had to create two new levels. We will each be teaching 4 different classes. That means I have 8 classes a week. One of Emily's groups is the very young children, 7 and 8 year olds, so they will just meet once a week. So she will teach 7 classes a week. This is in addition to continuing our Friday Activity Nights, our MMM group meetings, starting a Coffee Club for those 18 and up, getting the Children's Choir started again, and just generally doing what we do. I have a feeling that time is going to absolutely fly during this session because we'll be so busy. But I'm super motivated right now and have been working non-stop today on making sure every detail is ready. I'll be doing the same tomorrow. You know me--everything has to be organized in an overly meticulous fashion. lol I can't help it! ;)

During our last session we needed to give each group a name so we could keep them straight and had a way to label them on a schedule. We took the easy route and went with colors. Simple enough. Or so we thought. Many of our students kept asking us this week if they got to move to a certain color group now when we start our second session. They had no idea which really came next, so they guessed. It was funny to Emily and I because we didn't name them based on their level. We just assigned colors at random. lol

So this time around, in order to avoid any confusion, we chose to use U.S. cities as the name for each group. We figured this was appropriate because they're learning American English, so we should pick a place that speaks American English. Plus, they ask about American places sometimes so we figured it is a good way to help them learn a little about the good ol' U.S. of A. :) We ruled out Chicago and Milwaukee, since those are the places we lived before moving here. Then we made a big list of ideas and just picked the ones we wanted. It worked out well because I'm pretty sure we didn't "fight" over any cities. lol There we plenty of interesting places to choose from. Emily chose Honolulu, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Nashville. I chose Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, and Atlanta.

For my classes, I'm going to do a few new things this semester. To limit the walking around (not that it was anywhere close to bad before) and getting in little competitions to ask who can help me with things, I'm going to have a schedule of classroom helpers. There will be one person, or helper, for each class period. We'll draw numbers during our first class to make it fair. I'm going to let them keep the American names they picked last time. I only have 2 new students, so they'll just pick a name right away. I'm also going to have a big attendance chart for each class. In general I didn't have problems with poor attendance but I got sick of kids always asking me how many they'd missed or if they were late, etc. This time, we'll make it visual. They'll get a sticker if they're on time, a "T" if they're tardy, and an "A" if they're absent without telling me. They know the attendance policy and were pretty good at following it last time.

The other new thing I'm doing is having a "Word of the Day" (WOTD) in each class. Just fun words that I use but they don't know. For example, I told one girl she was being silly and they didn't know what that meant. Guess what their first WOTD is going to be? ;) Hee hee! With my intermediate level class, we're just going to use bigger words. For example, we're going to learn "bashful" instead of "shy". And we're going to learn "adequate" instead of "good enough". Also, with each section, I'm going to be working much more on actual speaking practice. Not just repetitive speaking practice, but where they have to stand in front of everyone and say something, even if just means telling us two things they "will do" (practice with the future tense) this week.

Besides getting all of this ready to go, we resumed church services this week, now that Agron and Vitori are back from visiting their daughter in the U.S. I have to admit, it was nice to have that part of the weekly routine back. :) That should catch you up on what's been going on since we returned from Italy. I'll continue the Italy saga tomorrow.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.....