The weather today is "mouillé". It's dreary out - wet, cold, and doing that miserable raining one moment snowing the next thing, making me look rather silly with my umbrella. In French, it's such a hard word to pronounce and I asked the students to teach it to me. I think it's important that my students think of us as teaching one another so I encourage them to help me with my French. My easy errors in French seem to give them more confidence their English "apprentissage". And I'm lucky because they are fabulous teachers. Today, I was taught "mouillé" as "moo" as in cow, and "yay" as in a rap song. Seriously, they started throwing up innocent gang signs and rapping in Franglais. Mouillé is officially memorized. Sadly, the weather forecast isn't improving so I think I'll have ample time to practice my new perfectly pronounced word.
One of my classes had a pottery session today. I love that the children learn pottery in school! They are making bowls for their mothers for Mother's Day. I was delighted to see all the "I love you, Mom!'s" written across many bowls. I took advantage of the art time to color my flashcards. It's quite pricey to print in color, so I've been printing in black and white. Meaning, of course, that I get to color the flashcards in! My students have a cornucopia of colors - in colored pencils, crayons, and markers. This often results in creatively colored flashcards - like fushcia basketball uniforms with lime green shoes. I like to think that this just makes it easy for the kids to see the colors. Anyways, in the midst of my coloring craze, I had a chat with one of my students about the United States. She was telling me about a TV program she watched with her parents about the death penalty in the US. We discussed why it exists and how terrible it is. The insights kids have are remarkable. To them, it's simply "wrong" which is so much more effective than my lengthy explanation of all the cons as I tried to fairly list the pros some see. Wrong is wrong.
In more positive news, their pottery turned out wonderfully and their "mamans" will be delighted.
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