British Curriculum

Today was a great day! We mostly stayed on campus for class, but we definitely learned a lot. In our morning session, we met with one of the Liverpool Hope education teachers and he was wonderful! His name was Colin Wong and he taught us all about the British curriculum and how their  school day works. What I found most fascinating is the students do not start til around 9am, then they have a 15 minute break at some point in the morning where they can play games, read or go outside. Then the come back for more class. They then have an 75 minutes for lunch! This was very interesting to me because back home we usually only have 20-30 minutes to eat. It will definitely take some getting use to, but it will be nice to have sometime to just relax and enjoy our meal.

                                                   My travel group with Dr. Colin Wong!
                                         

After we met with Colin we had lunch and my group chose to stay in the education building and eat at the cafe there. I had a wonderful lunch of couscous with peppers and a banana. I also picked up a Cadbury bar that will hopefully make it home, but we will see if that happens. :) I also picked up some bottled water for our trip to Scotland this weekend. Bottled water is not as big over here as it is in America. They also do not have water fountains, so if you want a drink of water you have to get a water bottle or drink from the faucet.

After lunch we have our first seminar with Dr. P! The first thing we did was pick what classrooms we wanted to work with this summer. I decided I wanted to work with the younger grades because I am usually with grades 3-5 back at Ball State. A lot of my classmates wanted the younger grades, but I fought (not physically. haha) hard to get a younger grade, and I received it! I will be co-teaching with my friend Caitlin Agan, in a year 2 classroom! Year 2 would be children about 6-7, so it would be a 1st grade in America. I am so excited to get into the classroom and see the similarities between an American classroom compared to the English ones. Also during seminar we talked about what literacy means and the different aspects of phonics and so on.

After seminar, my traveling group got together and worked out our trip for our week long trip coming up. The third week we are here we have the whole week off because it is bank holiday in the UK and the schools are closed. We are going to spend that Monday and Tuesday with the rest of our classmates, but we are then going to leave Tuesday night for Barcelona, Spain! We are going to stay in Barcelona until that Saturday before we head back to campus. This is our first big trip, and I am so excited, but nervous at the same time. I have a great group though, and I am positive that we will make the most of our time there. After we made our reservations we went to dinner where they made us lasagna and a baked potato which was very good. After dinner we went down to ASDA (which is like Wal-Mart) then came back and went to the student union here on campus. At the student union we met some wonderful ladies from Liverpool and Ireland who study here at the university. We talked about various things and it was really an enjoyable time! They also have never had s'mores so we are going to make them some before they leave for summer holiday. They also promised to take us out and about Liverpool to show us all the "cool" places to go to.

                                          Brandon and I at the Student Union in our new
                                          Liverpool Hope sweatshirts!



Overall it was a wonderful day! I am very excited to go meet my Year 2 students tomorrow! I know I will make the most of it!