March 2024

English Class - Level 1

We have finished our theme about the City!  The kids are so excited to show off all they have learned and they are very proud of all their work - as they should be.  As we were reviewing all the vocabulary the last day, I quickly noticed one of my students helping his friends by giving them the starting letter for words they couldn't remember.  When we finish a theme, I take the students individually for an assessment to see how many words they can recall from the theme.  I told this student, "I'd like you to go first."  He looked at me really surprised and a bit hesitant, and I said, "Let's just try," and with some encouragement from his friends, he began the assessment.  He recited all 32 words and I said, "That's it! You got them all!"  He looked at me with saucer-wide eyes, "I finished?!"  His friends came over patting him on the back and applauding his hard work, and I had the greatest joy watching as he fist-pumped the air.  When the class ended, this student's mom called saying, "My son texted me that he got all the words right on the recitation?" I replied, "You have a very talented, hard-working son.  He should be so proud of himself for recalling all 32 words.  I am very proud of all his work."  I love being encouragement for these kids (and parents!), knowing some of my students have a hard time in traditional school settings, it is an honor to show them that they really are clever, talented learners.  Average for the assessment was 25 remembered words with 9 of the students getting perfect scores.

In our City vocabulary this month, we learned some animals we might see in the city, traveling areas (street, sidewalk, etc.), things at a park, and community helpers.  I really made sure that in this theme the students still had a variety of new vocabulary words and not simply names of buildings in the city.  It created for many different games and lots of ways for them to connect their new vocabulary with their lives.

Spring weather is giving us the chance for games on the patio again!  Those smiles to be out in the sun are plain to see. 

One of our favorite games this month was called "Statues!"  Students made statue poses (some of the kids even worked together to create group statue poses!) and one student would look for a statue who isn't staying perfectly still, say "statue" (one of our vocabulary words) and change places.  I was impressed with their frozen creativity, and translators and I loved the nearly silent, active game!

English Class - Level 2

The older English Class students have been continuing in their theme about the Five Senses with a few of my favorites, taste and smell!  Taste is never a complete theme without taste testing American Jelly Beans!  There are a couple kids in both of the classes that really loved the spicy Jelly Bean flavors and I was happy I had a pack of Hot Tamales to divide up between the students.  Cinnamon flavored candies aren't popular in Czech, so for the kids who like that spicy kick, it was definitely a treat!

The American Menus are filled with pictures, which isn't typical in a Czech restaurant, and the kids had a lot of fun looking at what food was being served at this American restaurant.  The retired menus were from 15 years ago, and the students all commented, "you could get a brownie and ice cream for a dollar?!  When can we go?!"  I showed them the print of the menus was 15 years ago and that certainly inflation has changed the prices and time has changed the menus, but they thought it was super cool to have real American menus in their hands.

The lessons on Smell was filled with smelly markers and scratch-and-sniff stickers (which I also bring special from America for this purpose).  Their notebooks are filled with lots of different smells, and now it isn't abnormal to see the kids with their faces laid atop their notebooks - not because they are bored in class, but because they are smelling all their stickers!

The students had a mix-and-match food erasers activity and then described how it would taste.  When taking pictures, I said, "imagine how your creation would taste!"  Needless to say, icing on bread with strawberries would taste okay (picture 1)... french fries in a an ice cream cone may not be making it on a menu anytime soon (picture 2)!

Homeschool English Class

We have been working through different English grammar rules and exceptions in our Homeschool English Group - which can be a daunting task, but these students are actively working to understanding the concepts.  I am seeing that their reading fluency is becoming more confident and quicker as they have a wide range of memorized vocabulary and now sounding out words they don't know with correct English phonetics.  After a few weeks on English phonetics (which could be studied the whole school year and still not completed), we moved on to parts of speech as we looked for nouns in sentences and stories.  

I'm always so proud of their efforts in English Class.  Since there is some range in the level of English understanding in this class, I try to find activities that challenge the higher-level students and are still accessible in understanding for the lower-level students.  They are all such hard-workers (typically), that it isn't hard to keep the group moving forward.

Little Linguists

The toddler class has been growing rapidly!  One week we had 16 toddlers running around the room, plus all the parents - I am so glad it doesn't feel crowded as the space is large enough to accommodate all the little, running feet.  Over this month, our themes were Boats, Fruit Salad, Hats, and Hop!  We had fun seeing different colored fish from our boat and collecting treasures.  A couple of the toddlers and I made a boat with the MegaLegos and went on a boating trip.  One of the moms began throwing the stuffed animal fish in the boat saying they were jumping in the boat!  The toddler quickly grabbed the fish and hugged them tight declaring, "I'll save them!"  She was convinced holding onto the fish in the boat was "saving" the fish... and no one had the heart to tell her as she tightly gripped the stuffed fish so they wouldn't fall back into the "water."  

There was lots of cooking in the play kitchens in our theme about Fruit Salad.  The kids decorated paper plates with lots of fruit stickers.  We had many funny hats to try on with our Hat theme, and the toddlers loved putting hats on moms and aunties too.  The American hats are always my favorites, though the toddlers seem to appreciate the crowns, cowboy hats, and knight helmets just as much.

Our lesson titled Hop is always my favorite to do around Easter as hop like bunnies (and frogs, kangaroos, grasshoppers, and everything else that hops!).  We jumped everywhere, played with bouncy balls, and skipped plastic frogs in the air.  I even had a set of plastic Easter eggs and a basket, and we practiced hopping around to collect eggs with a bunny stuffed animal in tow.

There's always something special about storytime, and we had lots of fun seeing if this little mouse would be able to hide the strawberry!  The toddlers loved finding the strawberry on every page and laughing at the ways the little mouse tried to hide it.

The bill of the cap continued to fall over her eyes, so I spun the hat backwards on her head and said "Go see how you look in the mirror!"  This toddler walked backwards all the way to the mirror so that the hat would "face forward"! 

Kid's Club

Sometimes it's the mundane games that are the most fun.  BINGO is one these kids can play for hours nearly every club, and they still love sitting together and playing.  It is one of those games that doesn't take much concentration, is based on luck, and when there are little American candies for the winner, the games go by pretty quick.  After long days at school and studying for exams, these kids want to do something together but not too active, and BINGO just hits right. 

The creativity of the little boys at club is always my favorite to see.  They come up with their own games and enjoy including me in their play.  Sometimes I get to play the fourth person in foosball or jump in during dodgeball, and other times they want me to just capture their creations as they show it off.  We have had many of the girls start coming more regularly.  They are often giggly and love dancing!  I am also very glad they have a safe place to come to as some of the students we work with have hard times with relationships in school.  It is encouraging that they connect with the leaders at Kid's Club and can chat through some of life's deeper middle school problems.  

Mission Church & Youth Group

Starting this new year, one of my goals was to begin leading Sunday School.  Since I work with kids every other day of the week, I always took Sundays to rest from work with kids, but more and more God continued to put these kids on my heart.  Many of them are in my English Classes and most of them I have known their whole life, so I already have the foundational connection with them.  I convinced another leader to join me in co-teaching, and we were ready to start teaching once a month on our little Mission Church rotation.  Except I was sick last month when we were supposed to teach about Jesus healing the paralyzed man.  So, our first official lesson was this month.  The theme - why did Jesus have to suffer for our sins?  Oof!  Big theme for a first lesson, but we knew the kids could handle a big theme if we could manage teaching it.  We looked at Jesus' time in the Garden of Gethsemane and talked through what was happening.  One of the students (an 8-year-old) said, "wouldn't it be crazy if one of the men who arrested Jesus later believed him?"  I quickly jumped in my Bible to the centurion at the foot of the cross who declares, "surely He is the son of God."  Another student in the class wrestled with this thought, openly saying, "I know Jesus died for everyone... even the men who killed him... but that just doesn't seem fair."  We talked through this big theme and made a string of hearts that say "God heals my broken heart." 

We joined Mission Church and Youth Group together this week on Thursday evening for a Seder Meal as Jesus would have had on Passover.  We went through all the different symbolism of the food and tradition of the meal and how it relates to us now in our walk as Christians.

Outreach

When I added a fourth Elementary English Class to my regular weekly commitment, I decided to cut out school visits.  Many schools in the area invite me as native speaker for holidays and special culture lessons.  Over the years, I have developed a running list of holiday and culture lessons that are appropriate for different English levels to encourage their English progress.  One of the things I've noticed is that it can be hard to gage how the class will respond to different activities and engagement in the lesson as they are unfamiliar with me.  So when one dear friend of mine invited me to her village school, I knew I could make the exception - I think I knew half the school already!  A good few handfuls of the kids attend my regular English Classes.  I taught three lessons and taught the entire school, 1st-5th grade!  The youngest group had a lesson about Easter and the older two groups about American Culture.  Even weeks later, a child from the youngest class saw me in a different setting and enveloping me in a hug declared, "I still know the word 'bunny' from the Easter lesson!"

One of my students - who has been attending my English Class for years - had her premier in translating the younger class!  I was so proud of her!  Only a 5th grader, but she has incredible skill and talent, and I was most impressed with her teaching voice!  Many of my first-time translators need help to find their voice as they are shy and nervous.  Even though I could tell she was nervous, she projected her voice with confidence and didn't take her eyes off of me.  I nearly bubbled over with joy as after all the years of teaching her confidence to speak in English, she exactly as I knew she could!

Easter & Friends

The Catholic Church in town puts on a performance of Jesus' life to celebrate Easter.  It is always a wonderful way to go into the Easter weekend, and it is their second year of doing this performance.  The performance finishes with Pilate and his wife, discussing his decision, and though the crucifixion is mentioned, it is only shown through the questioning of one of the women to a Pharisee teacher.  What I really like about this performance is that at the end, the organizers get on stage and explain that there is more to the story and to visit any church this upcoming Sunday to hear the rest of the story.  I think it is a magnificent way to share the story of Jesus' life and encourage people to come to church on Sunday.

Many of my students and friends had roles in the performance.

One of my Easter Traditions is going spend the holiday with some American Missionary Friends and their kids!  The kids and I have been waiting excitedly to see each other again, and the weekend was filled with Easter activities (decorating treats & eggs, an egg hunt, Good Friday and Easter Day services, etc.) and, of course many games and reading lots of stories.

Some English-speaking friends and I have recently started a bookclub.  We enjoy calling in each month and even made a day-trip to Prague to meet in person.  It is a feat as many of us live all around the country, though I was greatly encouraged by these women and very encouraged by the literature we are discussing!

February 2024

 Winter Retreat

To kick off February, we had our annual Winter Retreat!  It was decided to have a smaller group this year so that we could really invest in the youth students who spend time with us regularly during the year plus a couple former youth students who still attend and help us on the retreat.  We were all very happy to have such a tight-nit group and could easily gather everyone together, play our regular Live Action Mafia, and have good discussions. 

While in Minnesota I grew up with Winter Retreats that included sledding and broomball competitions, in Czech we take our youth students to the mountains for downhill skiing and snowboarding.  I always love skiing down the slopes trailing after the youth and watching them have lots of fun!  For convenience, we often start by splitting up into smaller groups, but this year, many of us ended up finding each other on the slopes until we were nearly all together again.  While the weather was a little wet and foggy, we enjoyed the time.  A group of us also went ice skating one afternoon while the rest of the group enjoyed the afternoon resting at the cabin.  We were all pretty tired after the weekend filled with activities (and many of us ended up catching colds), but the time together was irreplaceable. 

Our theme for this year's Winter Retreat was based on Philippians 2:15, where the Apostle Paul encourages Christians to Shine as the Stars in a broken world.  We spent the three evenings talking through what it means to be a Christian and how we stand out in a broken world; how our salvation in Christ is like flickering stars as we approach it in awe (as Paul describes it in "fear and trembling" two verses earlier).  On the final evening, we divided into small groups to discuss how we can stand out in this depraved generation, and one of our youth students said he was ready to make that commitment and stand out in faith!  He had been thinking about God for some time and realized there was no reason to wait any longer!  Another "shining star" was added in the heavens that evening, and I am confident it was accompanied by an angelic chorus.

 

Watch a video of Winter Retreat HERE!

English Class - Level 1

These kids have been continuing in their theme about the City!  We have been learning many new vocabulary words in English including places in the city and occupations.  Recently, the students have been trying to translate our books more and are really getting good at recognizing and translating phrases that have been repeated multiple times.  I am always so proud of them! 

 

These kids have such great smiles and joyful personalities.  I love the energy they bring to the class!  We learned in one of our recent lessons that our repeating parrot, Opakovacka, likes to be quite silly and tease our translator.  The kids and the translator were all in fits of giggles and it makes learning English so much fun when there is an unruly, repeating parrot who seems to be running the class.  

 

English Class - Level 2

The older kids have been continuing in their theme of the Five Senses.  We have finished Sight and Sound as we spend two weeks on each of the five senses to really grasp the vocabulary around it and learn how ti use it in English conversations.  As we have been practicing Sound, we considered the terms "loud, quiet, noisy, squeaky, and rhythmic" to describe how something sounds.  The kids this age adore animals, and I keep coming back to animals (because we can use animals to practice so many things!).  The students have been using these terms to describe how animals sound.  A lion is loud; a mouse is squeaky; a songbird is rhythmic.  We also learned we don't know how all animals sound and the curiosity of students this age became a question on repeat!  The next lesson, we asked the students to please choose animals they know how they sound to try to bring all the questions to a minimum, but I love their curiosity.

In the next lesson on Sound, we continued using the same vocabulary words to describe the sounds inside homemade maracas.  The students tried to match their noise with someone else in the class, use one of the new words to describe how it sounds, and then guess what is inside the maracas.  We also learned new vocabulary for animal sounds - bark, hiss, meow, roar, growl, thud, tweet, and buzz.  As always, we are continuing our writing challenge as the students are creating a story using the new terms we learn.

Homeschool English Class

Homeschool group is working on the basics of English Phonetics.  We have already practiced short vowel sounds and then I introduced TH, SH, CH, and WH blending sounds.  We also practiced Sneaky Silent E.  I had noticed that some of the students were having a more difficult time sounding out new words in English, so I decided it was best to teach the basics of English Phonetics so that they would feel more confident reading longer texts and larger words.  I typically teach vocabulary and conversations through a variety of games since the kids typically get lots recitation practice in school; however, since this group is homeschooled, I didn't want them to fall behind their peers.  So, we still play lots of games, learn lots of new vocabulary, and talk while we learn phonics and sentence structures.

Making Sneaky Silent E masks with lost of silent E words!

Catching Fish with blended sounds 

Little Linguists

Due to Spring Break and a week that I had to miss (plus the fact that February is a shorter month), we only had two Little Linguist classes this month!  The toddlers loved our lesson on hearts (pun intended...)!  Our song was about lots of different hearts and different colors and how we share our hearts with others.  The Littles would then trade hearts with each other. Our Dramatic Play center was set up as a Cafe and the toddlers had a wonderful time making heart-shaped cookies and serving their moms lots of imaginary coffee.  One of the toddlers brought me many cups of coffee during playtime until finally she just brought me the coffee pitcher... I guess she was tired of bringing me so many cups!

This week, our theme was "At the Farm!"  There were 12 toddlers in the room, and it really felt like a farm with everything going on and all the noise.  It was so fun to see them engaging in lots of different activities, creating their games, and playing with new friends.  We made farm pictures, did lots of animal puzzles, and made barns for toy animals.  After finishing with our "goodbye" song, one of the Littles didn't want to leave, so she sat on my lap so I couldn't leave either!  I'm convinced there is nothing sweeter than toddler hugs! 

One of the reasons I enjoy Little Linguists is the chance to get to talk with parents about their children and encourage them in ways to expand their child's learning at this very impressionable age.  Having a background in Early Childhood Education, I often look for and point out the achievements in communication, play, and social development.  As I acknowledge these aspects and create an environment that promotes learning and cooperation, it's my desire the parents will feel encouraged and supported.

Kid's Club

Some of my favorite times at Kid's Club is when kids come back to check-in!  These two were some of the first kids who started coming to our Boskovice Youth Center seven years ago.  They were just little kids coming on their scooters back then, and now they are high school students!  Many high schoolers in Czech attend schools in different cities and it makes it difficult for them to come to youth clubs because of the increased homework and bus schedules.  It is always really fun for us to reconnect with these students when they have the chance to visit us again. 

The kids in our youth club in Letovice like coming back to the familiar games and leaders each week.  I can always count on some card and board games with this group of kids as well as some foosball.  There is also a group of kids who come on their scooters and are enjoying the open event hall to ride around inside on our mini-ramps while the weather outside is still a bit cold and dreary.  I enjoy watching them encourage each other on their new scooter skills and record the jumps for each other.  Mostly, I love that our youth center provides a place for these kids to connect with each other.

Youth Group

After returning from a great, long weekend at Winter Retreat, we continued in out theme about Shining as the Stars and talked about how stars and mountains remain constant like God.  (Since we had been talking about stars while in the mountains the weekend before, we could all relate to this.)  However, fog comes and suddenly we cant see the stars or mountains, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.  The fog is like our emotions; sometimes it clouds our ability to see God, and we have disillusionment of the characteristics of God because our emotions affect how we see Him.  The students all understood this as they had gone back to school and regular life and realized the fog started coming and clouding their ability to see God.  We talked about the importance of meeting together as a group to encourage each other and remind each other that God, like the mountains and stars, remains constant even when our emotions and the fog comes. 

To remind ourselves of this, I had the youth write on one side of a notecard all the emotions they felt in the week.  On the other side, they wrote "But God" to remind them that God is greater than all the emotions they felt during the week.  I encouraged the students to cary the notecard with them during the next week as a reminder.

Outreach

Our biggest event of the year is a summer day-camp called LetFest!  We opened registration this week, and within a day our Sports Classes have hit capacity and there are limited spaces left in English Classes.  I am in awe of how God continues to move through this ministry and the excitement students have by returning again and again each year.  We are beginning meetings as a team and our American Friends are also underway in planning.  Everyone has been looking forward to LetFest 2024 since we ended LetFest last summer, so it is exciting to be in that planning phase!

American "Auntie" Time

There's always something special about "American Time" and spending a week with these three little girls made my heart flow with joy!  While their parents headed off to a conference, we spent their spring break in what seemed like a personalized kid's camp!  We spent so much time outside (puddle jumping mostly since there was lots of rain!) and the rest of each day was filled with reading stories, making a puppet theatre, lots of art projects, singing, hair braiding, dancing & instruments, playing board & card games, and creating our own stories and song rhymes.  On one particularly rainy day, one of the girls suggested we watch a movie, and I said, "I just don't know when we will fit it in!  We wanted to play a board game and do another art project and bake a treat still!"  The movie idea was quickly forgotten as they looked forward to lots of other special activities, and we made many lasting memories. 

"Wouldn't it be great if instead of lots of puddles, it was just one big puddle that covered everything?!"

"Ummm... we call that a flood."

"... but you could jump in it, and it would be fun."

Imagination Play at the park was one of our favorite things!  We all had different roles and imagined we were on a boat in the ocean.

Lookout: "Oh no! Pirates! And Sharks!"

Captain: "Big waves! Monsters!"

Me: "It's chaos! What will we do?"

Fisherman: (starts pulling in fish faster)