Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Today I finished my fifth day at St. Paul's! It feels like these past few days have gone by so fast. I have started to teach about food during the social studies time of the day. I am teaching about food groups and the nutrients found in food! It has been difficult to incorporate social studies into this topic because I would consider food to be more of a science topic. But the children seem to enjoy it! This week is only a three day week since there is another holiday at the end of this week. I am looking forward to flying to Paris on Thursday! This past weekend was amazing! Friday we went to the city center and walked down to the Port of Barcelona then back up Las Ramblas, the Main Street of the city center. We ate at a great Mexican restaurant, La Rosa Negra and had a great time. Saturday we took a train about 45 minutes away to a little town, Stiges. The town was beautiful and I loved being near the Mediterranean Sea.  Sunday we went to Mount Tibadabo which is the highest point in Barcelona and over looks the city. It was amazing standing up there and looking down over the small buildings. We then made our way to Parc Guell with the famous mosaic tiles designed by a famous artist, Gaudi. Today we visited the Sagrada Familia, a beautiful famous cathedral. The architecture here is unreal and I am so amazed every time we see something new!

 
Standing in front of a lion at the Port of Barcelona. 

The Mediterranean Sea


Stained glass windows in the Sagrada Familia. 


Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Hello everyone in the states I am here in Barcelona!

It's been a long two days since I left! Everything went smoothly while traveling but I am very jet lagged now. Today was our first day at the school! St. Paul's School is beautiful. It sits on a big hill and you can overlook the city of Barcelona. When we first learned we had to walk up the hill to school we thought it would not be a big deal because we walked wku's hill for four years. This hill is a monster and makes wku's hill look very little. It will take some time to get used to! My teacher's name is Mark and he is from England. It is great that I can communicate so well with him. He teaches two fourth grade classes, they call 4A and 4B. He teaches English, science, and Spanish history/ geography (which I know nothing about). We had the 4A class today. All the students were very talkative to each other, but seemed very shy when I tried to talk to them. Mark had the students introduce themselves to me and say their names. It is hard to pronunce some of the student's Spanish names. I then went around the room trying to remember all of the students names, it took me two times to get it correctly! Tomorrow will be a little more difficult since I will have to learn another 25 different names. Today was also St. Jordi's day which is like our Valentine's day. The men buy women roses and the women buy a book for the men. We decided to be big girls and take the train into the city center today to explore. But the streets were packed because of the holiday. There were many booths set up selling roses and books. It was interesting to see how they celebrate this day but we were all exhausted so we decided to wait to actually shop around the center when there aren't that many people!  Here are a couple pictures from today:

The View of Barcelona from my classroom
Lemon Gelato from the city center. Which was delicious!
 A beautiful street at the city center.

Thats all the Spain shenanigans I have for now!

Sunday, April 20, 2014

I am less than 24 hours until I take off for España!!

If you would have asked me how I was feeling yesterday I would have screamed that I was overwhelmed. As I always do with anything major in my life, I put off packing until today. I was so nervous that I would not get everything packed away in my suitcase. Since our luggage can only weigh less than 50 pounds I was constantly standing on the scale to see how many more pounds I had to go. Now that I actually have everything packed and ready to go my emotions have definitely changed! I am now very excited! I cannot wait to fly to Barcelona. I am looking forward to meeting my mentor teaching and the fourth grade class I will be working with!

My sister and Brother-in-law are taking me to the airport tomorrow so I am spending the night at their house. When I arrived they gave me a going away/ Easter present filled with goodies for the flight there! So very thankful they are always supporting me!