6th Workshop… Oh Yeah !

Yesterday I had my 6^th English workshop, which was also the final one for a few of the Leonardo da Vinci volunteers.  It’s strange when you start to build relationships with people to have to say bye to them as soon as you start to get anywhere.  Regardless, it was a great workshop and everyone seemed to be interested throughout, which I am very pleased with.

I started with a snowball game, where I had each person write down 5 specific facts down on a sheet of paper.  Everyone then scrunched up their paper and we mixed the pile up.  Each person took a random sheet from the pile and had to ask each other questions to find out who’s facts they had.  They then asked that person 2 extra questions to have more random information about them.  Following this, I had everyone present the person they had gathered the information about, so they were practising speaking and presentation skills at the same time. 

I wanted to make the workshop a little more chilled this time, especially after the mini presentations, so we all watched the first episode in the first season of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”, which everyone enjoyed.  The Fresh Prince is definitely universal!!! After that I did my presentation about the UK, to give them an idea of how to talk about their country whilst on their volunteering projects.  Everyone seemed interested and I think it was good listening practise for them.

Everyone listening to my presentation

Of course I talked about Everything is Possible in my presentation!!!

After this I decided that we needed to do some more serious work so everyone did some more work on the leaflet, which seems to be going well.  I know that it is difficult however for them to fill in the exercises all in English.  I hope that I am explaining the exercises well and that is useful.  Finally, I finished with working through a vocabulary sheet on useful employment words, such as “fire”, “redundancy” and “maternity leave”.

Overall, I feel as though my delivery style in the lessons is really starting to improve.  I find when I relate and empathise with everyone more, they begin to react to me better.  I have also become better at adapting my materials as I go along, which I need to do pretty much all the time.  As there is a range of levels of English in the classes, often the time I allow for exercises can be either too long or too short, but this doesn’t tend to cause any problems.  I also try now to ban any French talking throughout, so as soon as I hear French I tell them to talk only in English.

So in general a great session !! Now I’m going to head off, but as I said before, the post all about the culture here and differences in lifestyles will be coming soon, along with a look at my social life and travelling.  A bientôt.