Teaching and Learning

Sunday was as relaxed as anticipated: Katya and family welcomed us into their home for all three meals of the day which was most kind. There was a therapeutic meeting again which I think I grasped more of this time. Most of the day was spent on the sofa watching What Women Want and Hope Springs  - the latter of which featured Colin Firth looking rather yummy and being very funny, so I'd recommend it.

Yesterday was a day of teaching and learning. I did a solid hour's potato peeling after washing up, so I learnt how to efficiently use the potato peelers (a useful and often employable skill I assure you). After that we were invited to watch Sasha's English lesson - a double with the 5th form. I noted the things I thought were positive about the lesson, but also some improvements that could be made. It felt embarassing to correct Sasha when she got English phrases wrong - at first I thought they were errors and that she needed teaching the correct ones, but much like I do when I think about language too much, they were just mistakes (or at least I'll have to take her word for it). It feels good to see someone else try to teach and not get everything perfect first time, as I know I won't!

During Kindergarten I was in a really sad mood, thankfully the children were more feeling sitting and colouring in and playing (almost) quietly. We finished off The Little Mermaid and started on The Fox and The Hound. I didn't realise it might be quite... un-PC(?)... that the Fox is in fact orphaned right at the beginning. Nobody burst into tears though, so it can't have been such an insensitive oversight.

We had our first Russian lesson in the evening, courtesy of Lena. Though I found it pretty easy, it wasn't boring or unhelpful: the topic of family was covered a long time ago in my 9 years of studying Russian, so I picked up some new vocab and revised lots of old that I hadn't used in a long time. We even received our own workbooks and had homework to do afterwards - it feels like being back in school in a good way.

Today is a lovely, sunny, chilled-out day, only 3 hours of helping.

Thanks for reading,
Lois