Living the Prague Life

World of Change

It has been a while since I have posted and so much has happened and I've been waiting on permission for photo release before I could post.

What to do with Small Classes?
Some think that only having two students must be so easy. I would have to say I would prefer having 20 students over 2 any day! Indeed there is a lot more you can do when you only have two, and how well you get to know your students is wonderful. NO ONE can hide! However you do meet some challenges especially when activities require at least 10 students to complete. Graphing favourite things in math is next to impossible when you have to show the mean when you only have two to go from. My solution to this problem, if I don't have a class I will make one!

Introducing Miss Robinson's class of 24 students! I drew them and introduced them to my kids who thought it was essential that we name all of them! They were originally used for an assignment where we had to graph how many pockets each student in the class was wearing. From there they have been used to graph favourite foods and have been even been used as extra players in math games. They get their turn to roll and everything. They are even starting to develop their own little personalities given by my students. So yes I made friends for my students. When you don't have something in the expat community you make due with what you do have.

What is New

In January we started something new for our school. We have started our first ever English Language Immersion Program for littles! We have had a high demand to start a preschool program. However due to some legal hurdles we are, at this time, unable to enrol students under the age of 6. Our way around this hurdle has been to start an ELL program focused on preparing potential grade one students who have just recently turned six and will be starting grade one in the Fall,
So this January we started a new class with 4 Koreans and 1 Russian with potential for more. Currently the class is all girls and so we are praying for some boys! It is so exciting to have this group of eager learners and I am looking so forward to teaching this group next year! Please pray for this new program and our new teacher Patricia; as we go through the growing pains of developing a new curriculum and program for this class.

My students are loving having some new classmates during art, music and PE as well at play times.

Mapping our World

This term we have been studying globes and maps. It has been really fun for my students to explore the vastness of the world in which they live. Comparing the sizes of country land masses, , identifying the different continents and countries, looking at all the countries they have visited. Usually at this stage in life grade one and two students are not aware much of the world outside their own city or country. The exciting part of being in an international community is exploring how much of the world they have seen. It was fun to play a game of I have been there and it didn't surprise me how much of the world these kids have already travelled in their short lives. Though Miss Robinson did win with travelling to the most continents we were tied for most countries. We wrapped up our unit by creating a large relief map of the Czech Republic. (Our elevations were not exactly to scale but they did pretty good at showing the changes in land formations) Unfortunately due to flour fingers I didn't get any pictures of the mixing and laying process. We used salt dough. A wonderful invention that I can remember using for a number of projects with my parents when I was young.

Academic Fair
This week we had an Academic Fair. Kind of like a Science fair but instead of just focusing on science projects students were allowed to choose an area of study and create a project in that field. There were history projects, science, art, Czech, and Music. We chose to enter our Geography project and study of the landforms of the Czech Republic.

The grade four and five students did a wax museum focusing on World War I and significant characters from this era.

Wish I got more pictures of all of them but I didn't have time to get around to all of them. Also didn't make it upstairs to see all the secondary projects. However have a few pics courtesy of our history teacher and his Facebook page :)

Outside the Classroom

This last weekend I had the joy of getting to experience Czech culture and their love for biathlon! One of my friends (who is my Czech teacher) got a group of us tickets to go see the IBU World Cup (International Biathlon Union) which was just outside of a small village about an hour driver south of Prague.

Over 30 000 fans gathered from all over to watch this event. The enthusiasm and overall hype of the crowd was amazing. I have experienced few things like it.

The usual hour and a half drive took 3 hours due to the level of traffic on the narrow country roads.

The weather was also its own breed of crazy. It was almost like being back in Albert. One minute bright and sunny the next minute full blown blizzard.