American Holidays

So I know it's been a few weeks since I last wrote....I failed again to keep this blog regularly updated. But I won't waste time with excuses.

I'll go directly to this blog's main subject: Holidays. I offered to give presentations on Halloween and Thanksgiving at my school. Being the week before the Halloween weekend and Bavaria's fall break, many teachers asked me to give my presentations on Halloween and Thanksgiving. I spent quite a bit of time on deciding how to present these holidays in a way that was fun and interesting to the students. Naturally, in order to get the students' attention for Halloween, we did a little bit of trick or treating in the classrooms. I also let them have a little fun with deciding what they wanted to dress up as for Halloween and draw a picture of their costume. Most students had fun with this. I had a lot of witches, gangsters, devils, zombies, and one Wurst (sausage)! It was also interesting to see how I had to often adapt each presentation to each class according to their interest in and knowledge of Halloween, their English proficiencies, and how they reacted to everything. I'm learning more and more how to quickly adapt my prepared lesson to the students, which can be difficult for me sometimes. I am the kind of person who wants everything to go as planned, but this often doesn't occur in teaching, and I'm learning to deal with that more and more. I'm finding that adaptation can often be fun too!

For example, for my Thanksgiving presentation/lesson, I prepared a lesson that was mostly just informational. For one of the teachers, I did this Thanksgiving lesson for three of her classes. After seeing my presentation in her two 10th year classes, she wanted to know if we could adapt it a bit for her 9th year class because they were more talkative and energetic. So we decided to have the students do a role-play. The situation for the role-play was a group of Pilgrims deciding what to do after they lost many of their community members and had little food. Should they go back to Europe or stay in America? I think the students overall reacted to this role-play positively. They came up with some good ideas beyond what we had provided them. There was laughter and energy in the classroom, and it was good to see the students use their English while having a little bit of fun.

Well, that's all I have time for tonight. Since I'm on fall break this week, I should have more time to write about some of my recent travels and post some photos.