6 days!!

Dear friends,

6 days!! I can’t believe it’s almost time for me to leave! I’ve gotten my housing arranged – finally – so that’s a huge relief. I sent in my depôt de garantie (security deposit) yesterday, so I should be able to move in next Friday, the day I arrive, which is great. There are already so many administrative hoops I have to jump through when I get there and I’m so glad that finding housing is no longer an issue!

I don’t actually know anyone else who’s going to be teaching in Nevers, but I’ve been emailing back and forth with a few of the other assistants, so I’m hoping that we’ll be able to meet up once we all get there – it will be nice to have a group of people all going through the same thing!
I’m starting to get a little bit worried about the actual English teaching part of this whole experience – the websites all suggest that we arrive in France with one or two lessons planned for our students so we don’t have that to deal with when we get there… But I still don’t know how old my students are, so I don’t know what/how much English they’ve learned, and I don’t want to waste my time and show up with something that’s either way too easy or way too hard for them! I’m thinking I’ll just put together a lesson about numbers or animals or colors, something pretty basic, just so I have SOMETHING. I am technically only an assistant, so I’m working with a real teacher, which is good – hopefully they’ll have something in mind that they want me to work on!

Something I think is really cool: in one of the brochures/information packets we got about this program, it says that Anglophone assistants could be responsible for ‘making recordings to enrich audiovisual materials in the school.’ I could be the voice of those listening exercises you always have to do when you’re learning a foreign language – how neat is that?!

Also, does anyone have any ideas of things that would be cool for elementary school children?? We’re supposed to bring ‘a variety of authentic teaching materials’ with us, so I have some tourist brochures from various middle Tennessee attractions, a map of Tennessee, American currency… Can you think of anything else that would be fun?