Happy Tu B'Shvat!

Happy Tu B'Shvat (well actually it was on Wednesday but I have been kinda busy so hadn't got around to blogging about it until now).

Tu B'Shvat is basically a new years celebration for Trees.  It's also called Rosh HaShanah La'Ilanot which literally translates to 'new year for the trees'. It's a minor holiday meaning no time off school but it's super cute.

To simplify what the holiday means (because it's kinda confusing), Jewish law says that you can't eat fruit from a fruit bearing tree until it's third year of production.  But how on earth do you figure out how old a fruit bearing tree is or when you can start eating the fruit? By Tu B'Shvat!  (It's genius really).  You can only eat fruit which ripens on or after Tu B'Shvat of the tree's third year.

To celebrate the holiday, school kids in Israel usually each plant a tree, except on the 7th year becayse that is the Sabbath year (or something).  People also have a seder (ceremony) where you eat specific pieces of dried fruit and nuts with each of them having a different blessing.  Dried fruit has also been on sale for the last month and with special varieties appearing like sun dried apple, peaches and pear without added sugar and candied pecans (which are honestly the greatest thing ever).

The kids at my school also put on a super cute play and had an hour of activities relating to Tu B'Shvat.

MM x

My first real project with my kids

I absolutely love teaching my kids but there are only so many textbook and workbook pages you can do before you want to set the books on fire and cry.  So, in order to stop this from happening, I decided to do a bit of a sneaky project with one of my advanced grade 6 groups.  

This particular group is a group of girls who have fairly advanced English skills and are super pumped to play games / have a chat.

The project I came up with (with a little assistance from my housemates) was "Dream Vacation".

We started out by all choosing a country that would be our dream vacation.  I choose Japan because it's the bomb and the girls chose Italy, Spain, France, Australia (yay!), the USA and London.  After this, we answered the following questions:

• Why do you want to go to this place?
• Who will you go with?
• How long will you stay?
• How will you get there?
• What will you see, do, buy and learn?

The girls absolutely blew me away! Each knew a lot about the country they wanted to visit, especially the girl wanting to visit Spain.  She told me she wanted to see all of the Gaudi architecture in Spain.  I was gobsmacked because I barely know what Gaudi architecture is!

After discussing the different dream vacations, we set about making posters which is crafty aka the best ever.  That's one thing I've learnt about myself while being here - I absolutely love craft.  I don't care that it's lame.

I made an example with Japan for the girls to take some inspiration from.

I honestly couldn't be prouder of the girls.  The final products were amazing!

MM x

A day in the life of an Israel Teaching Fellow

Yesterday was an absolutely incredible day at school!  I brought my Mum in to see my best (and favourite) class, my advanced grade 6's.  We had been preparing all week for her visit and they had all prepared a speech to present about themselves, a few words about a project we have been working on and a few questions to ask my Mum.

After we finished up, the kids wanted to take a photo with us but because of privacy / consent issues (I used to be a lawyer after all), I told them to draw something on the board and that we would take a photo of that:

Honestly, how cute is that acrostic poem.  It reads:

M - Mona and Sulana
O - Overwhelming
N - not give us homework
A - awesome we love you!

I promise that I didn't bribe them to write it.  I mean seriously, how perfect is the word for 'O'.  I explained what the word meant to one of the girls the other day and I think she thinks it means amazing plus a bit more which I guess is close enough.

Before getting into my wonderful grade 6 class, I had a grade 5 class.  The teacher cannot control this class.  It is a fairly large class (around 30 students) in a small room with a few expert trouble makers.  The teacher spent the whole 45 mins yelling at them to settle down.

But sitting as an outsider at the back of the class means that sometimes you get to see some really cool things.  One of the magical things I saw today was self-directed learning  A lot of the advanced kids in this class sit towards the back meaning it's easy for them to do what they want as they don't really get seen or heard.  So today, one boy started going through the index at the back of his textbook picking out words and then testing himself on the spelling.  This then moved to his desk buddy testing him on the words and vice-versa.

These kids weren't really interested in doing the text book (mostly because my fellow teaching fellow and I had done those pages of the book with them last week).  By the end of the class, about 6 kids were working on this impromptu spelling bee in pairs.  I thought it was incredible!

One kid also spent the entire class making origami and he made me a ninja as he called it (aka a ninja star). I seriously could not love these kids anymore!

MM x

Teaching ESL

A day does not go by where I am not killing myself with laughter because of these kids.

Today's shoutout goes to a girl in one of my advanced grade 5 classes.  We were playing the vocab board game (which I have since renamed Words With Mona) and one of the questions was "what is your favourite season" (referring to a division of the year marked by changes in weather, obviously).

Girl (reads): "What is your favourite season?"

Girl states: "I don't understand.  Do you mean like my favourite season of a particular TV show?"

Me: (giggling under my breath) "No! Like summer or winter..."

Girl: "Oh, of course."

Haha, these kids they never cease to amaze.  It was nearly as good as the time a kid asked me what muthafu**er meant.

In ending, here's a cute photo of pictionary I played with a weaker kid today #funtimes:

MM x