Today marked the official end of our first week. My teacher
was still gone so I was able to observe some more classes. In our year 7
English the students are writing original short stories that can be about
anything. We worked with the students on using descriptive language where you
describe and show what the characters are doing and how instead of just saying
it. The example my teacher was using was a short story by Paul Jennings called
“Smart Ice Cream.” I had never read this author before but he’s actually quite
good and very entertaining. She also gave me another one of his stories “A
Dozen Bloomin’ Roses” which was also so good but sad but it showed how you can
write about vastly different things using the same technique. I also observed a
literacy lesson where the teacher read aloud and students followed along and
kept track of words they didn’t know. Then at the end, we worked together to
break them down and define them, as well as discussed the context of them. I
also attended my first assembly. Every two weeks (or fortnight, according to my
students) they hold an assembly to discuss announcements and give out merits
from their various houses. It was
very interesting to observe the way that information is distributed amongst the
school. Also, it is student led so while teachers may present and discuss, the
heads of the houses do most of the organizing and handing out. All in all it
was a nice, relaxing Friday that tied off an amazing first week.
In
celebration of making it through out first week, we decided to have a barbeque
dinner in the park. It was such a blast listening to music, hanging out in the
sun, and just cooking up some food.
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| It's a little hard to see but here's all 11 of us! |
One of the boys, Jason, has some
world-famous chicken and pepper fajitas that I would happily eat every day of my
life- they were fantastic! We also had a special type of meat: kangaroo! That’s
right, I tried kangaroo and it was actually pretty good.
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| Me taking my first bite |
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| Me realizing that it tastes really good |
We tried two types:
fillets and sausages (which they call kanga bangas). The meat is actually very
good for you because it’s quite lean. It tasted a bit like venison and was
pretty flavorful. I also tried asparagus for the first time ever and that was
pretty good as well. Plus, our vegetarians made some awesome greek salad and our
supervisor brought Tim Tams for dessert. For those of you who don’t know, tim
tams are little chocolate cookies that may compare to girl scout cookies
because they are sooo good. We even grilled up some shrimp. Yup, just hanging
out in Australia making some shrimp on the barbie! Except apparently here they
don’t even call them shrimp, they call them prongs but either way, it was
delicious. Since both the other houses had cooked, I figured our house could do
the dishes so once dark hit we took everything back to our place for some
cleaning. By the time we got done, my stomach was over-full and I was worn out
so we called it a night.
