Feeling nostalgic

Since I last wrote about the afternoon classes I teach, I've managed to acquire a couple of new (and thankfully smarter) students. So now, my schedule's looking quite a bit fuller. Mon-Thurs I leave my house for school at 8am and get back around 3. On Monday afternoons, I've got classes with my 2 original students, Alberto and Marina, from 4:30-6:30. Tuesday afternoons, I've got 3--first with Jose and Lulu's cousin, Salva, from 4:30-6, then with Alberto from 7-8, and the last one with his aunt, Leti, from 8-9. Wednesday afternoons, I've got a class with Yolanda's friend, Toñi, from 5:30-7. And finally on Thursday afternoons from 4:30-6, I have class with Salva again. Classes with my 2 new students, Salva and Toñi are leaps and bounds more enjoyable than the others. Salva is only 14 and he already knows TONS of English. It's so refreshing to have class with someone who actually WANTS to learn English and always tries to explain himself in English, rather than immediately asking me in Spanish how to say something. Since he understands so much and our classes are an hour and a half, I've decided to incorporate some audio-visual aids to our lessons...i.e. MODERN FAMILY! It's a good teaching tool because the episodes are only like 22ish minutes long, the English isn't overly complex, the plot's usually pretty easy to follow, and not to mention the added perk that I am getting paid to spend 20 minutes of my class watching some good, wholesome, American family comedy haha

But anyway, back to the point, with the new students and quite a bit more work, I no longer spend my free time at school playing around on the internet. Instead, I spend it planning lessons. It's a real pain in the ass because none of my students are at the same level so instead of planning like 2 or 3 lessons a week and reusing them, I've gotta prep 7 different lessons every week. Not fun.

So a couple weeks ago, I was teaching Marina and Alberto clothing vocabulary. I figured a story about clothes would be good practice and would be entertaining, so I started searching the internet for a book. After quite a bit of digging, I found the PDF version of a book I remembered from when I was little (pictured below)...

I was pumped not only because the story would teach them both clothing and animal vocabulary, but also because the drawings are awesome and definitely funny for little kids. Marina DIED laughing when she saw this page...

It took her a good 3 minutes to be able to name the articles of clothing that the hen was wearing because she couldn't stop laughing at the egg in his pants hahaha. This book was a great find!

Inspired by Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing, I set out to find some more books that might be good for my lessons. I spent 3 days worth of free time at work looking for books (you'd be surprised how difficult it is to find full text versions of English children's books online) and got extremely distracted when I started finding books that I remembered from my childhood. Here are some of the books (excluding the typical ones, i.e. The Cat in the Hat and the rest of the Dr. Seuss series) that were most memorable to me...

This is the story of a little bird that hatches while his mom isn't in the nest. Since he has no idea what his mother looks like, he wanders all around asking everyone and everything he sees if it's his mother. He asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and even a giant piece of machinery that he calls a "SNORT." Who could forget the Snort? Haha. I found a few videos of people reading this book on YouTube, so I may have to resort to using those since I can't find the full text anywhere online.

Strega Nona tells the story of an old woman/witch who uses a magic pot to cook pasta. When her servant attempts to use it without permission, he doesn't know the secret to using the pot and he can't make it stop making spaghetti. Thus, the pot overflows and the town gets flooded with spaghetti. The servant's punishment is that he has to EAT the town out of it's mess. HAHAHA awesome, right?

My dad always read this one to Neal, Ben, and I before bed-time. It's about a fox who's trying to steal chickens from a farmer named Festus. Along with his cat, Festus decides that instead of going after the fox with his gun, he's going to scare it away with an elaborate plan including lots of fireworks. This one's got really great illustrations. When I was trying to remember the name of the book, I remembered the pictures vividly and was wishing I could somehow do a google image search using my memories of the book haha. But, after a little help from the brosephs and my padre, I was able to find the title...but unfortunately no full text copy.

 

The Story of Babar tells the story of an elephant who goes to live in the city after his parents die. He lives with an old lady and learns the ways of humans. Later, he goes back to the jungle and becomes king of the elephants. Forever depicted wearing his favorite green suit, Babar teaches his fellow elephants how to live a civilized (western style) life.

 Similar to the story of Babar, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile tells the story of a city-dwelling, domesticated croc. He lives with a family in their house, goes shopping, takes baths, and much more just like he is a normal human. For some reason, this book always makes me think of sitting under the stairs at Nana's (my grandma's) house and listening to her read to us.

 Speaking of Grandmas, these next few books were all books that my Grandma Mac used to read to Neal, Ben, and me...

"A told B, and B told C, 'I'll meet you at the top of the coconut tree!'

...Chicka Chicka Boom Boom! Will there be enough room?"

I remembered this book when I first started with my afternoon classes and was wondering if the alphabet would be a god place to start. It rhymes, it's a cute little story, and most importantly it teaches not only how to say the names of the letters but also what they look like in upper and lowercase (the lowercase letters are the one's climbing the tree and their parents, that appear at the end, are the uppercase letters). It's a MUST HAVE for teaching the English alphabet!

I have probably had this story read to me like at least 100 times. It was seriously one of my favorites in all of Grandma Mac's collection. Its about a girl who wakes up one day with a giant pair of antlers on her head and has to figure out how to deal with it. I remember it so vividly. She slides down the banister and gets her antlers stuck in the chandelier. She sits in the garden and the birds enjoy being perched on her antlers. They talk about decorating her like a Christmas tree.

 

The story of TYRONE, the T-Rex, who is basically just a big asshole to all the other smaller dinos. He cheats in the sack race by tearing a hole in the bottom of his sack and running. He cheats at dino bowling by stepping OVER THE LINE (Big Lebowski, anyone? haha). When he attempts to cheat at a treasure hunt, he finally gets what was coming to him as he gets stung in the face by a whole hive of bees haha. This is a pretty stupid book looking back on it, but I was definitely a fan when I was little.

 

It took me FOREVER to remember the title of this one. I remembered the story (they're detectives going to Egypt to stop someone from stealing some old artifact) and one of the character's names (Pinkerton) but could not, for the life of me, think of what it was called. After much searching, I finally found it on Amazon. This one was more than likely not a common story, but Neal, Ben, and I must have loved it if I was able to remember the name Pinkerton after probably 15 years of not having heard that story.

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales had to have been the newest book in our collection of books and Grandma Mac's. If I'm not mistaken, it probably came from one of the book fair's that Trinity, my elementary/middle school, put on pretty regularly. It basically takes old classic tales like the story of "The Gingerbread Man," "Chicken Little," and "The Princess and the Pea," and changes 'em up and makes them a bit sarcastic so that they're funny. Phrases like "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" and "you can't catch me cause I'm the Stinky Cheese Man!" will forever be stuck in my head.

I couldn't possibly see one of these books without thinking of Grandma Mac. They remind me of the days we used to spend in "the back room" with her. We would sit on the beds that were covered with bright-colored, patchwork, handmade quilts and she would read to us as we ate trail mix (it probably had a special name, but I can't seem to remember what it was if it had one) that was made up of hand-picked and hand-shelled pecans, raisins, chocolate chips (served cold), and Jet-Puffed Mini Marshmallows. Afterwards, we would take turns playing "shooters" and arguing about who would get the good shooter with the black trigger and piece of plastic inside and who would get the crappy one hahahahhaha. SUCH good memories. Man, that was the life. I want to go back to those days when the biggest worry I had was having to choose between reading one of the books above or to watching "Ernest Scared Stupid" for the millionth time haha. I miss all that and I miss them, but all the memories I have like those from these books will always remind me of the good times we spent with them.

On a less sad note, two of my friends from college, Audra and LB are coming to visit me in 5 days! YESSSSSS! This will be the first time in nearly 6 months that I will have seen anyone from home, so I am SUPER pumped! I got next Thursday off from work, so on Wednesday afternoon, I'm heading to Madrid via train to meet them. We're just going to do dinner in Madrid and maybe wander around a bit before we head to the airport again to catch our flight to Malta! I'm going to be running the half-marathon in Malta on Sunday, Feb 27th, so we decided to make a little trip out of it. (By the way this will be my second half--I did my first one here in Almería on Sunday, Jan 30th with a time of 1:58:44...breaking 2 hours was not bad for a first time half-marathoner!) After the race on Sunday, we're going to stay an extra day and then we'll head back to Almería on the March 1st. After that, I've got no idea what we're gonna be doing, but I'm sure it will be an adventure. They're going to be here in Almería with me until the 10th so we'll get to celebrate Audra's birthday (Mar 8th) Spanish-style. As far as living space goes, we're going to be quite limited. Putting our extra full sized mattress on the floor of my room means basically zero space to walk around...and with the whole plastic tubes/piso-is-falling-apart situation, I'm not sure exactly how this is gonna work out for 10 days, but I'll be finding out soon enough! 

Hope y'all enjoy the post and that it brings back memories for all of you too! Lemme know if I left any other important classics off my book list--or if you know where to access them online cuz I'm still stumped!