The Merchant of Venice, presented in our school show!

The time finally came, in the evening of the 14th of June, for my other (E1) 5th grade students to present all the work they did the last few months. Almost all of them knew their English lines by heart, and only one student needed his sheet of paper in order to feel more confident, even though he could remember most of his words.

We did have some problems with the sound, as the sound expert the school had hired arrived late, but other than that the kids enjoyed it a lot, they got plenty of kudos, and eventually they felt more bonded.  Mission accomplished!

 

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You can see my shadow on the right of the last picture, along with the shadow of my dear colleague Maria Dimitrakopoulou, who was so amazing and kind as to come to our school show just to be by our side! Thank you so much, Maria! Happy summer, everyone!

The class garden book – finished!

Mr. Angelos Michalopoulos and his E2 class did a wonderful job creating an amazing botanical garden and then hosting an event of guiding other classes through the various plants, talking about the qualities that they have, explaining the procedure of composting, helping each student plant a seed and then give them the pot to take at home, showing students how to make a homemade mosquito repellant, how to make a herbal mixture to send off unwanted insects and protect new plants, talking about healthy eating habits and even playing a game to illustrate them. Finally, students had a chance to see the garden book the E2 class created during our English lessons, with the names of the plants in Greek and English and the qualities that they have, in both languages. My students were so proud to present their book and everything else they did with their teacher.

 

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Great job, everybody!

Rapunzel, illustrated

I love telling stories and fairy tales to my younger pupils, in B Class. I also love reading them from the original, and they often love to listen, especially if it’s the last hour of the day and they are too tired to do anything else; it’s relaxing. I tell them a few things about the story before I start, and I ask them a few questions about it when I finish, to see if they have understood the basics, and they usually have. On such a day, I brought Rapunzel to class, and they were totally absorbed!

We also discussed the plot, analyzed the characters and shared our feelings about this tale. The next time we had a lesson, I wrote a few sentences, excerpts from the story, on the board, and asked them if they could guess what they meant. Indeed they could, for most of them, they have a way of remembering clusters of meanings that I repeat, so then I asked them to copy them to their notebooks and see if they could tell me which sentence goes first, second etc. I had to switch to Greek here a lot, if I was to get any answers, but in general they were able to number the sentences correctly.

On the third time we had our Rapunzel lesson, it was time for them to draw! Each student was given a sentence from the story, told which scene to draw, and asked to copy that sentence at the back of the piece of paper. We put all the drawings together, in the order the sentences appear in the story. This was the result (some of it, anyway):

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This endeavour came after I attended a seminar with Mr. Nikos Toumazatos, about how to illustrate a children’s book. I was definitely inspired, what can I say! I just hope I can ask my students to illustrate more in the future, it definitely seems to be making a difference when it comes to involvement in the story!