Month: October 2015

Quick Lesson Ideas for Primary Assistants: Flashcard games!

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Here we go, current/future assistants, just in time for the start of your contracts. My favorite, easy lessons, with little-to-no prep involved!! Plus, see here for my favorite art activities! Flashcard games GALORE!!!!! Flashcards and other visuals are so important to teaching new vocabuluary. Your colleagues may have flashcards you can use, especially for basic things like the weather, days of the week, or emotions, etc. But if they don’t, you should ABSOLUTELY create some. Simple clip art or hand drawn faces/sunshines/rain clouds/animals are all you need. There are tons of games you can play with vocab flashcards….here are a few of my favorites: Show me – Very simple premise: ask a student to show you one of the vocab words. They come to the board and point to it. Or, you can pass out the cards and call out a word and the person with the corresponding card must hold it up. This can be fun with colors if everyone has scraps of colored paper and must hold up the color you call out. What is …

Endless Summer of Fun–employment

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Even though today is the first day of October and it’s been a chilly, rainy week and schools started at least a month ago, I still feel like I’ve been on summer vacation since May.  This isn’t the nice beach vacation you have in mind though. It’s the forced vacation of being “funemployed.” After what feels like a million unsuccessful interviews, I kind of had to accept the fact that for the types of jobs I wanted, I either should have applied for them while still in France, or I would have to wait until schools were starting up again, when theatre seasons were starting up again and therefore making new hires: August/September. Let me tell you, that made for a pretty depressing June and July. (Sidenote: Is it really normal for employers to interview you twice and then never ever contact you again, even avoiding your multiple polite emails on the subject? I’m asking because this happened to me more than once, and it just seems extremely rude, not to mention inconvenient. I literally missed out on other work …