English Week 2012!

Last week, the other English teachers and I prepared a series of open lessons and extra-curricular competitions for English week in our school. As usual, I prepared some decorations for the door to my little mini-classroom. I've found that the students love checking out whatever I post on my door, so its actually one of the most effective ways of advertising my events and projects to my students.

Don't laugh at my crayon drawings....

I prepared a poster about school rules for one of my English teachers.

We started off the week on Monday with a small assembly of 2nd through 4th form students. Three girls from the 7th form prepared a presentation on why English is important in our lives, and they translated it into Russian for the younger students. I tried to capture what our hall assemblies look like, but the lighting from the big windows makes it difficult.

The first competition of the week was for 10th form students. Students from the 10A and 10B classes split into 2 teams and answered a series of trivia questions about Great Britain, including geography, government, history and of course the major facts about London.

The Rainbow team. 

Team Smiles with their teacher, Svetlana Ivanovna. 

Two of the students acted as hosts for the competition (or "leaders", as they refer to it in Russian) and the English teachers served as the jury panel. 

The setup of the competition. 

Students answering questions from the hosts. 

Next, the 9th form students prepared some projects about environmental protection and presented them during an open lesson. An "open" lesson is when anyone is permitted to come and observe the lesson, this usually means that the director or one of our vice principals will attend the lesson.

Diana from 9A presents her project about the different ideas of things you can do with an old candy box. 

Katya from 9A presents the 3 R's.

Misha from 9A presents about water pollution.

Tanya from 9V with her leaflet about 7 important environmental problems. 

Katya from 9V presenting her project about the protection of whales. 

I organized an after-school competition for students from the 4th form with another one of the English teachers. I only teach the 4A class, but the 4th graders love coming to my English club to play UNO every week. We had the kids divide into 2 teams and they competed to see which team could complete coloring and matching worksheets faster and correctly. We also learned and sang Old MacDonald Had a Farm together :)

The team from 4B. 

The students from 4A. 

Explaining the different tasks in the competition. 

Connecting the dots with the alphabet... this was completely candid and its my favorite photo. 

Liliya Nikolaievna checking one of the worksheets. 

Teaching the words to Old MacDonald. 

A vocabulary game - I said a word in Russian and they had the find the correct translation in English. 

The 4B students. 

With my students from 4A. 

This year, the Men's Day holiday was in the middle of English week. This holiday is not an official school holiday, but women in Ukraine still give cards and small gifts to their husbands, sons and friends to celebrate it (similar to Father's Day in the US).

The girls from 11A welcomed all the male students into the school by congratulating them. 

The girls from 5A organized some interesting contests... including apple eating. 

They also had a mini-show for their class party, including dancing :)

Men's Day was traditionally celebrated as Soviet Army Day in the past, but it has now been changed to the Defense of the Fatherland Day (День защитника Отечества). My teachers had prepared a small lunch party (in the regular Ukrainian style) and we celebrated this holiday after the school concert. A few old veterans from WWII came to our school concert and I wanted to take a photo of them, but I was afraid to ask because I didn't want to be rude. But it was amazing to see that they were so decorated with medals and its crazy to think that they were young men on the battlefield during the war.

One of the 11th form girls singing at the school concert. 

The lunch table... complete with sandwiches, salo, and pickes!

A few of my teachers with our physics teacher Yuri Alexeyevich. 

An ensemble of our teachers singing for the male teachers. 

We finished up English week with a display of the students' project work. There were reports on the environment from the 9th form, media/press in Ukraine from the 8th form, leaflets about sports from the 6th form, recipes for cooking from the 5th form, and different drawings from 4th form.

Sasha, Inna and Leyla from the 9A class with their projects. 

And the final competition of English was was about pancakes, but this has already been a super long post so I will write about it separately in my next post :D

Happy Valentine's Day from Ukraine! С Днём ​​Святого Валентина!

Valentine's Day in Ukraine is just like Valentine's day in the States... people exchange gifts, valentine cards, chocolate, and flowers. All my students were too excited about the holiday to focus on the lessons yesterday, so we did a Valentine's crossword in my 9th and 10th form and a word search in my 4th and 6th form classes. My school even organized the anonymous Valentine delivery service, where 3 little girls dressed up as Cupid's angels and went around to every class to deliver Valentines :)

Cupid's Angels!

The kids also had a small poster contest, where they basically painted giant Valentine's day card greetings. The posters were all displayed in the first floor of our school. Here are a few of my favorites.

A cute poster by the 5A class. 

"St. Valentine's day is the day for everyone in love" - 6A class. 

"When we are together, its cool!" and "The whole words is for us today! The whole world is for us always when we are together: you and I" - from the 9A class. 

And last but not least, here is a small sample of what Ukrainian Valentine's day cards look like... these are all from my students and friends! They don't have any cartoon-character themed cards, but they love hearts and roses just like Americans do.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Wishing you love and happiness from Ukraine! 

Bomb Shelters, Bracelets and Basket Weaving - Winter Russian Language Refresher

Last week, I went to the winter Russian Language Refresher camp. Peace Corps traditionally has 2 language camps each year (for both Russian and Ukrainian) and this winter, the camp was held in Chernigov - a city/oblast center in central Ukraine. There were approximately 50 PCVs there, and we spent several days studying Russian grammar and practicing our Russian speaking/listening/reading/writing skills. I also took another Language Proficiency test (affectionately known as the LPI) and scored at the Advanced Low level! I'm glad that my Russian has finally moved up from the Intermediate High level, although the teacher who did my evaluation told me that I would have scored a higher except I tend to only speak in the nominative case and use only the masculine form of adjectives... aka my grammar needs some serious work. But oh well, at least I've made some progress - I'll keep trudging away at the grammar!

Cases... the bane of my existence. 

The different elective "clubs of interest" that were offered each day. 

We also had the chance to participate in some cultural activities such as touring the bomb shelter (бомбоубежище) located in basement of the building that we were staying in. During Soviet times, many cities prepared bomb shelters in main buildings and actually trained their citizens on what to do in case of bombing.

Following everyone into the bomb shelter!

This door is curved, which was designed to withstand the impact of a bomb hit. 

Look how solid this door is!

The bunk beds. 

So for example, in that building they had prepared to withstand bombings by installing things like a filtration system and a small water tank. The filtration system consisted of a simple input/output system that would clean incoming air and then eject the outgoing air. Or maybe it was vice versa, I could have misunderstood the explanation in Russian. These cranks were designed to run normally on electricity but could also be manually worked if necessary.

Theo cranking the output valve. 

Pushing the input valve. 

The water tank. 

They also had bathrooms and showers down in the basement - they rerouted the sewage pipes for that basement bathroom to go 200m below the ground (when the city's sewage system was normally only 10m below ground) just in case everything collapsed under the weight of bombs. They also had beds down there of course, although I didn't see much in terms of entertainment... I wonder if they ever had to actually use that bomb shelter during bombings. 

Bathrooms. 

Power switches for the bomb shelter. 

Another interesting club that I attended was the hand-made club.... where I made some bracelets! Other people learned how to knit scarves, cross stitch, and embroider in the traditional Ukrainian style.

Linda and I with our bracelets. 

Knitting. 

Cross-stitching. 

Earrings!

The figurines from the salty dough club!

Along with the theme of Ukrainian cultural lessons, Volodiya tried to teach the boys how to do the male part of the traditional Ukrainan dance. The male part is very physical and difficult to master, which made it amusing for the girls to watch. Katya had already taught the female part of the dance during dance club :)

Chest out, shoulders back, and open your arms up wide to the women!

And kick...  while your friends got your back. 

Next, you can try to do it by yourself (the trick is to do it without falling).

And my favorite lesson that I attended at Russian language camp.... basket weaving! Volodiya gathered a bunch of willow branches and taught us a basic weaving technique that he learned from his mother. He told us that she used to weave baskets to carry things like food back from the market in their village. Of course, none of our baskets look as smooth and professional as Volodiyas but it was still awesome to actually produce a basket from sticks!

So many sticks... 

Starting the base from 2 long and 2 short sticks. 

See... our bases are starting to look circular.

(The next day) evolving into baskets!

Still working on the baskets (I'm weaving around a waterbottle for structural support). 

Almost done.. most of us are finishing up the handles. 

Ta-da! The finished baskets!

I also tried to organize a Talent Show at the end of our Russian language camp, but unfortunately not very many people were interested in showing off their talents. I wish I could have sang (like the summer, when I adapted Lady Gaga's Bad Romance into Russian) but I had a sore throat all week and almost lost my voice... so I was barely able to speak, let alone sing. But we still had some really fun talents!

Mysterious as a Sphinx....

Sphinx, sphinx, sphinxxxxxx.....

Music club with Sergei and Helen. 

Counting to 1000 in Russian with Nathan and Richard. 

The Sphinx team plus Andrew!

I had a fantastic time at Russian Language Refresher camp, and I really hope that I'll be able to go to the next one in the summer... though it will be much harder to get selected as a participant because I'll be one of the oldest groups of PCVs in Ukraine by then. It's so weird to think that I'm considered one of the older (and therefore more knowledgeable and experienced) PCVS now! One of the most interesting things that happened to me at this camp was that several group 41 PCVs came up to me and introduced themselves and told me that they read my blog before they came to Ukraine - its amazing to feel like people actually take the time to check out whats going on in my life and follow my blog! Thank you to all my readers out there :)