One school down, one to go!

This morning I called my smaller school and asked about coming in to confirm my teaching schedule. The secretary told me to come in the afternoon, so I walked around a bit in the morning, before hopping on my bike and heading down to St-Exupéry.

When I got there, I quickly met the principal, who was pretty busy, since she's only principal on Mondays - ie: administrative things only get done on Mondays, and she teaches the rest of the week. Someone else showed me "The English Classroom," complete with a cute little British flag crayon drawing on the door - that will have to be quickly amended. Anyway, this means that I get my "own" classroom, since I'm pretty sure nothing else happens in that room! Excellent! This way, I'll be able to put up vocabulary around the room. There is already a little poster with the numbers 1-10 hanging on the wall, and a pretty, if not terribly advanced, poster with a detailed, scientific drawing of all the parts of a flower, all labeled in English.

I'll be at St-Exupéry on Tuesdays and Fridays, from 8.30-10.00, teaching two grades. Here, they're called CM1 & CM2, which is short for cours moyen [year] 1 & 2. What all this means is that they're 4th- and 5th- graders. And thus, they will have had English already for 1 and 2 years, respectively. The directrice gave me my class lists, and I have 24 in 4th grade and 27 in 5th. The lists have all the kids' names, and in 5th grade, there are 3 boys named Dylan!!! And there are no other names in either class that double up... strange.

I'll have to write more about French names later, mostly to give some examples, because they really are pretty different than American names - and hardly any kids now are named Marie-Françoise or Pierre-David or anything else stereotypically "French."

Rode my bike home, and then went for a longer ride this afternoon. It's still very nice here, weather-wise; sunny, in the upper 70s, and utterly blue skies!

And finally, my new studio: