Sarah got home this morning. I had thought that she was going to meet us at the school, so I was surprised when she walked in the door(Caitlyn let her in).
Jamie and I spent most of the morning trying to come up with ways to make preschool better. We put a bag over a stool and changed our throw the animal on the shelf game, so that we show them a picture then they get a ball, but they are getting tired of that, so tonight we are going to look up things on the internet to do. It is just hard, because we can’t just look up things for little kids, we have to look up things for three year olds, that don’t understand us, that won’t make them out of control, and that will keep them talking. We will find stuff, though.
Poor Max does not like preschool. I can’t really blame him, all he knows is that he is trapped in a room for an hour with two big people that he can’t understand. Mark seems to do a little better. I think that he understands that we are speaking a different language, but I don’t think he knows that we don’t know Russian. He will point to something then ask me how to say it in English.
The Russian word for “give me” is die. Mark had something that Max wanted, and Max sat there pulling on it saying “die, die, die, die.” It was so funny, because I knew what he was trying to say, but the way it sounded since my native language was so different.
After preschool I taught kindergarten. I did Peter Pan for drama. Timur really gave me trouble. He is a smart boy, but he just does not want to be good and sit still and pay attention. He is constantly getting up and going to play with things, and making noise, and doing whatever other distracting things he can think of.
I was really nervous about my shop activity, because it was something that I know could have been done in five minutes, but I had to make it take twenty five. We were going to make Indian tepees, and all we were doing was tying three straws together, making a cone out of paper, then putting the paper around the straws. It worked, though. First I showed them the Peter Pan book and talked about the Indians in it. I had made Indian headbands, so we put those on and talked about it, then we all sat on the floor and talked about how Indians sit on the ground, then we all went “ahhh” and tapped our mouths, then we talked about the tepees. We were using straws to make them, so I brought in two different kinds of straws, and we talked about how they were different and how they were the same, then by the time we were actually making them we only had like five more minutes. I was so nervous about them. I was really hoping that Caitlyn didn’t come in for that lesson, but of course she did. It makes me so nervous to have her there, but it is her job as the head teacher. Everything went ok, though.
After lunch was Russian class. We went over some more food, then some numbers. Next week I think that we are doing verbs. My biggest problem with Russian class is that I actually want to learn Russian, I want to be able to speak it, but the other three are just interested in being able to get around while here, so that is what we are focusing on. I can still learn stuff from it, but the stuff I want to know, how to congregate a verb, all about the different cases, stuff that will actually let me speak the language I am not learning.
I did a little bit more studying after class, just going over flash cards. I am getting better at placing the accent, but it is still hard for me. In Russian class the teacher told us that she wanted us to make a list of verbs we wanted to know so that we don’t just have a random vocabulary. I couldn’t help laughing about that when we got back to our room. I get most of my vocabulary from trying to pick out words in church and looking them up in the dictionary, so I know words like honor, branch, and law, but I don’t know the colors, and I can’t count past 10.
I made a tokens chart for the older class. Doing the store with them always exhausts me, because it is so hard to explain to children that don’t know what you are saying that they saved this many tokens from yesterday, they earned this many tokens today, the thing that they are saving for costs this many, so they still need this many more. It is hard anyways because they are still young, but to add in the fact that they don’t really understand is just hard. I made a little chart that goes up to 70, and they each have two markers. The green one is how many tokens they have. When they first come up they can see how many they had at the end of yesterday, then they can count theirs, count the spaces on the chart, and move their marker to see how many they now have. The second marker they have is blue, and it shows how many the toy they are saving for costs. That way they can look at where they are, and see how many they still need, and it is a physical thing, not just some words that they kind of understand. It worked so well. Arena, the one that I have the most trouble with, got it immediately, and was even able to figure out on her own how many tokens she still needed and didn’t give us any trouble. It can take me five minutes to explain it to her sometimes, but this was so easy and quick.
Sonya cutesy formed my name today. In Russian you can add things to the end of things to put them in cutesy form. Not everyway will work with every word, but the way I know is the take away an a from them end of a word and add ichka. At the end of class while I was helping Sarah with store Sonya called me Samantichka. I thought it was so cute. That is basically a form of endearment, and I thought it was so sweet.
At home we had FHE, then played spoons. It is more fun with more people, but it was still fun with only a few people.
Samantha
