Summer in the City

While not technically summer, the word estivale has been tossed around more and more of late. And while I certainly do not tire of the situation, there's only so many times one can write home saying, "it's yet another sunny, blue-skied, breezy and gorgeous day in Metz!" It seems like we've had rain less than a dozen times since, no exaggeration, the end of February. And hardly any rainy days. Today is no exception, and is even possibly the hottest day yet. I was already sweaty within 10 minutes of marketing this morning at 10.30!

Good weather and a combination of other things, like lots of hanging out with friends, reading, paperwork, organizing my life, and a general lack of "news-worthy" (and by extension "blog-worthy") accounts for the lack of updating here.... (Sorry, Grandma!)

But all is well.

The most blog-able things come from my days at school. The kids are still holding on strong, miraculously, despite the lovely weather and often swealtering classrooms. I particularly like this time of year with my oldest students, the 5th-graders, who have about had it with elementary-school life, and are more than ready to move on to middle school. Instead of starting a new unit of vocabulary or grammar for the last couple of weeks, I've planned out some different, fun and of course educational activities for our classes.

This past week we started a geography unit, which will continue this week, and in which we talk about geographical features, the continents, oceans, and then focus on North America and then the USA. Lots of the vocabulary are cognates, which makes it easy for them to do some more complicated activities, like coloring and labelling maps. But they enjoy it because it's different, and we get to talk a lot about the US, with which they are completely fascinated.

After that, I'm really looking forward to having them write stories. A colleague had a worksheet she was using with her 1st- and 2nd-graders, to have them write a story that accompanied illustrations of a mischievous pet frog escaping from his owner and causing all kinds of ruckus in the public garden. We've spent a fair amount of time working on present-tense conjugation of regular verbs in English this year, so with a bit of vocabulary suggestions on my part, I think they'll come up with some really great tales.

Wrapping up units in my other classes. Trying to decide how and when to do final evaluations and then report cards...

Only three weeks left.

Time is flying.