Time is flying by - I can't believe we are already half way through Week 2! On Friday night the team from Language Kingdom invited us all out for tapas and drinks in the centre of A Coruna. It proved difficult to find somewhere that could seat 19 people but our persistence paid off and we rounded off good food with a couple of drinks at the local beer festival. Eating dinner at 9pm each day, both in the dining hall of our accommodation and when dining out with locals, certainly takes some getting used to!
On Saturday I explored the town with a couple of friends and had tapas in the grandeur of Maria Pita Square and took a walk by the marina. On Sunday we were treated to a trip organised by Language Kingdom to the historic Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, which was about an hour away. Despite the rain, we enjoyed a tour around the impressive cathedral, the destination point of the Way of St James, a major Catholic pilgrimage route since the 9th century, thankfully without having to walk the 100km route to get there. We were able to visit the shrine of St James without the long queues typical of the high season - hopefully his blessing will stop me from getting the lurgy gradually spreading around the teachers in my school. Naturally, we had to follow this with tapas and I had my first taste of the local octopus dish (tasty) and the famous Santiago almond cake (underwhelming).
Monday and Tuesday are my most intensive teaching days so I had several lessons to prepare across 5 age groups 4-14, including one observed lesson. I go from singing songs and covering numbers and the weather with 4-year-olds to doing a lesson on phrasal verbs with 13-14-year-olds in the PET class. I acted suitably uncool, wearing my hat back to front and sunglasses, to perform a 'rap' (& I use that term loosely!) that I had written using all of the phrasal verbs from the lesson and then asked them to create and perform their own. I'm not sure the next Eminem is amongst them but they seemed to enjoy the creativity.
This morning I was teaching 4-year-olds again and then began a module from the course book entitled A Trip to the Farm with Primary 1. This covers most of the farm animals you would expect -
sheep, pig, horse, duck, chicken and goat but, bizarrely, instead of
cow they learn
bee! Since when has a bee been a farm animal?!
I now have a break of a few hours before one-to-one speaking practice with the after-school students 5.30pm-6.30pm so I am enjoying the relaxed atmosphere (and wi-fi!) of a local café, Miss Maruja, to escape the quietness of the school staff room for a couple of hours. After a couple of overcast days with drizzle and crashing Atlantic waves, which I could happily watch all day, the sun is now shining and life is good in A Coruna! Hasta luego amigos!
 |
| Maria Pita Square |
 |
| Crashing Atlantic waves |
 |
| A Coruna Marina |
 |
| My timetable |
 |
| Phrasal Verb 'Rap' |
 |
| Phrasal Verb 'Rab' |
 |
| Santiago De Compostela Cathedral |
 |
| Santiago De Compostela |
No comments:
Post a Comment