Inspirated in Porvoo - VAU!

I´m too tired to write down anything very clever, but this day has been so inspiring that I`m full of new ideas and can´t wait until school begins and I can begin to test them!

Porvoo- Borgå - it is so eye-opening to look at a very familiar town with the eyes of a tourist  - all new for me!

Mark Andrews is just what I remember from Kuopio two years ago - full of good humour, inspirated and openminded, a really heartwarming teacher! As I remembered, he is not only teaching the language, he is teaching us teachers how to teach! 

I put here just a few remarks of the work today - I`ll make a conclusion of these three days on Friday, because tomorrow we will have a nice dinner at Haikko manor house, where we enter by boat!

Ideas given by Mark:

-the beginning (of a lesson) gives you the atmosphere

-Don´t do things you can ask  your pupils to do (in our case, the blinds which were drawn down to keep the room dark enough for pictures)

-"the hotel boutique" - we had to solve the idea of this word in groups and we ´ve done some THINKING too!

-We had to create something new all the time, and were introduced to "the pyramide"- activity which was a good way to activate our teamwork skills and co-operation by writin/drawing down our thoughts about England! 

Here is five different thoughts of England- the last is our groups painting, what I´m partly in charge of.

We were divided into five groups of six/each, and after making the posters, we had to agree which of the points were most significant for England. Then Mark gave us a warning about to generalize too easy the English are...." etc. 

-Even if you have a plan for your lesson, try to feel your pupils interests for the moment and be able to use it! It means : "Go with the flow" 

-when the energy is flowing, don´t cut it off- be flexible!

-instead of doing a generalization of things, remember the sentence; "in my opinion"

 The English flag and how it was built

Finally we had a talk about the English flag and its history and about the vote they had in Scotland last Autumn and about how to talk about more personal things- we were introduced to know the PARSNIP -letters:

don´t talk about Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, Ideologics or Porc  if you´re not very familiar with your students!

and then last but not least - don´t be afraid of the new it- systems the new generation is born with it! And we had a video with Marks two-years old son who first made some "learning-stuff" his father asked, but then used a computer gallantly!

We ended up the first day by watching a two minutes long  video telling the Jesus-story in a modern way - take a look!

Youtube - "the digital nativity"

Now, I have to get some sleep - it is a new day tomorrow. and I`m already waiting for it!

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