Friday I made it back to Maestre Pie to help teach in the English classes with the schools English teacher Laura. The past few weeks have been stressful because the school’s headmaster has been sick, and this past week there was also sick teachers. Laura had to step up as a leader so when I arrived to help, I could tell she was very happy to see me. For the first hour I was with the level five class and these students are working on terms for clothing and body parts. I sat with individual groups and helped them say what they were wearing. I have noticed these kids having the same problem as I do in Italian class, and that is constructing sentences properly. They remember the vocabulary pretty well but when they are asked to say “I am wearing” and then the terms, they struggle. I do this same thing, but because their ten and eleven year old children learning the same things as me I am pushed to study even harder. This week was my first week in the nursery and I helped teach a group of five year olds a song in English. Now to me, the fact that these students are learning ANY English at the age of five impresses me. They managed to pick up the vocabulary for pig, sheep, horse, and mouse from one of the songs. We sang a song about colors of autumn or autunno and they learned the word for brown, yellow, and orange. When I walked into the nursery, three different Italian women rushed to greet me. This was great except that since they were Italian, they were speaking in very fast Italian. I managed to understand some of it, tell them my name in Italian, and say that I only spoke a small amount. You sometimes impress yourself when you are put on the spot and forced to create sentences though, and this happened to me that morning at the school. After teaching the five year olds songs and making horse and mouse puppets I went back into Laura’s classroom to work with the level three class. I planned to teach them about a typical Thanksgiving meal. We did this and I gave them all a lot of vocabulary words for the wonderful food that I eat on Thanksgiving, but they also taught me a few things. There were some words that I didn’t go, because at this point in my Italian studies I do not know the word for every type of food in Italian. When one of the boys asked me how to say cereali in English I had no idea what he was talking about! Come to find out, thanks to my Italian-English dictionary, he meant cereal which I should have known. The language barrier also makes for a few nerve racking moments in the classroom. As I may have mentioned before, my students are a lot less far along in their English studies than some of the other girl’s students at their schools. Their smaller knowledge of English has given me the challenge to work on my Italian more, and I need that. Because of our group trip to Matera and Val D’Orcia this week, I will not be going to the school again until the 20th.
On Saturday the science and society class was required to go on a day trip to Gubbio, but I am very glad that I chose to go along with them because it was a beautiful city. Gubbio is a small city close to Perugia, where I went for the chocolate festival a few weeks ago. It is the rival city to Sansepolcro and this past year we beat them at the Balestra, which I attended in September (I can’t believe I’ve really been here since September!). We arrived in Gubbio and took a lift, or as they call it a “funivia,” to the upper city. It was small but charming, and the ride up was beautiful. There was a church of course, and a wedding was being held on this day. I never saw the bride, only the beautifully decorated cars for the bride’s getaway. The views from the top made the ride even more worth it, but so did the company at the top. Being all together in these last few weeks is important because I now have a relationship with everyone here and we will not be together like this again in four more weeks. After a group picture that almost led me to tears, it was time to go back down to the center of the city and get something to eat. Sam, Bekah, and I managed to find a charming pizzeria which no Americans had been to since the currency changed to the Euro. I had the best calzone I’ve had since being in Italy. We walked around and let our food digest while exploring the rest of the city. It was beautiful and while waiting for the bus we explored the part near the city center. There was a collection of beautiful, autumn colored trees. The day was beautiful and luckily we had no rain.
Sunday was a productive day for me. I got a lot of work done, went for a run with Nicole (we ended up getting soaked from rain!) and then enjoyed the evening. I was in bed by eleven for the first time that I can remember. I hope the week continues to go as well as it has begun!!
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