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| A picture on my walk to the school. The sky was such beautiful color of red and orange, but the ground was frozen with frost! |
It has been another two days in the school, I cannot believe how fast the time is flying. Tomorrow is Thursday! It is sad that I won’t be able to be at home eating a turkey dinner with family and friends. Instead, I will be teaching about Thanksgiving and hopefully the students will start on their State projects that they are so eager to learn about!
Today, I taught multiplication and division of whole numbers to the 5th graders and multiplication and division of decimals to the 6th graders. Needless to say, it was very interesting. According to Frida (the teacher I was working with today) said this was a way that the students had never seen before. As I noted earlier, they do their math in different ways. I taught them how to do the problems the “American” way as some of the students called it in the classroom. Some of the students loved the new version being able to place the numbers on top rather to the side and “saying goodbye” to the numbers they do not need to use when multiplying triple digits by double digits. But the lesson went well and I was proud of how it turned out! 6th graders had math before lunch and the 5th graders had math after lunch since their school day started at 10:00 today and lunch is always at 11:00 in the morning. But, Frida had a parent-teacher conference during the 10:00 math lesson and Britt – Inger (The Special Education teacher for Linblomman) was suppose to be teaching with me as the Swedish translator in the classroom but shee took the day off because she felt very overwhelmed with things going on with student plans. So I taught the 6th graders how multiply and divide decimals all by myself. There was not another teacher in the classroom and the students understood what I was teaching to them and they really enjoyed the lesson! I didn’t even know where the time went because the next minute I knew it was time for lunch!
Now for the rest of my day: During lunch, I ate with the students. Today’s lunch menu…. FISH! Once again, I ate fish for lunch with some Swedish pasta dish that was fabulous. I think this adventure is opening up my world of eating a variety of foods. After lunch, while the students went outside in the freezing cold, I then went into the teachers lounge. I had a nice conversation with Katarina and Frida about math lesson and the differences. Then a teacher who was subbing (I forgot his name) was having a conversation with me about the differences in the schools. He explained that he had been to the United States before and had to sit in for a class. He said it was much different than being in a classroom in Sweden. Afterwards he tried teaching me riddles in Swedish. He told me that my goal for the next two weeks is to memorize these three riddles. Needless to say, I do not remember them and they were extremely difficult for me to say. But it was a fun conversation at lunch to talk about with the teachers.
For the last two hours of the day, they were the longest two hours I could imagine. The last two hours were spent for the students at “study hall” or time for the students to get caught up on their homework. Students do not take home their homework because the parents feel that it is something that needst to be done in school. It amazes me that they do not take their homework home, but there is time taken out of the day for the students to work on their homework. While I was sitting there working on English with some of the students, I had some interesting conversations. First, there was one about me doing gymnastics on YouTube. I was really shocked that the student went on YouTube and searched for me. She said, "Allison, I found you on YouTube." I looked at her with great confusion and said, "Really what was I doing?!" She said, "Well, you were doing this thing in the air running up on a podium and rolling around in circles, but you looked awesome." Afterwards, I tried explaining what I was doing and she just nodded and agreed with me, she said that she still liked calling it the rolling thing in circles. Then we started talking about gymnastics with like five other girls at the table and how she thought that I looked really cool. One of the girls had done gymnastics before and she said that she loved doing all the events. They even do it in gym class, but I missed it because it was the week before it I came to the school. I was sad because I could have helped out a lot with that unit! Once we finished talking about gymnastics, Katarina and I started talking about MAC computers and how Pillar (headmaster/principal) would like to take part as a pilot school for having MAC computers in the classrooms. I happened to be traveling my laptop today and I pulled it out to show Katarina the computer. We were talking about the programs and how all the teachers in the school would have to take classes in order to know how to use a MAC. I was explaining what components the MAC computer has and how it works. She was very impressed. Then all of a sudden, I had a buzz of kids swarming my computer because they were all very interested in the MAC. Some of the students that were scared to talk to me were talking to me about the computer. It was like something magical with the students. Once, I put the computer away, the students were sad I put it away, but I felt that I was distracting the students from their homework time. I know it can be difficult to work on homework for two hours in a row with a ten-minute break. The students seemed to be handling it well working on a variety of assignments that are due to the teacher.
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| On my walk home from school at 2:00 p.m. The sun is about to set. There is not much daylight here! |
After school, Katarina (my cooperating teacher) invited me over to her house for dinner. This is where I met her boyfriend, two daughters, and their pet dog, Linus. Her house reminded me of being in the woods in Wisconsin, there is a lot of forestland, very few houses around where they live, and there is a lake right by their house. Even though it was dark when we went there, you could see the 11 houses lit up in the area. I was very thankful for the meal that they provided. It was another elk stew, but it was fabulous. The meal consisted of elk, string (mashed) potatoes, salad, cracker bread, and a really good chocolate sticky cake (almost like a brownie). After we finished eating dinner and talking about the United States, I played a game called “Mix Max” with her eldest daughter Stina. It was a fun game, but very hard to understand since her daughters are too young to know English. Her other daughter wanted me to speak Swedish, but Katarina had to explain that I did not know Swedish and that is why she had to translate for me. But it was very nice of her to invite me over and I would say that I had an overall amazing day with the kids and had another Swedish meal.
Well, it is getting late here again… I must prepare myself to teach a little bit about Thanksgiving and the 50 states for tomorrow! I cannot wait to see how the lesson turns out!
Have a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving!
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