First Adventures in New Zealand

As planned, this was our first weekend that was full of activities. It started Friday night by going to New Market (outskirts of Auckland) with my host mom, Jan, and her friends. One of her friends works for the Lion Brewery so we met up with her there and took advantage of the fully stocked bar she has at work in the break room/bar. After we drove and had another drink and appetizer (Jan is on the left and Rob is on the right) before getting dinner at Wagamama. I was happy to see that name as it was a favorite restaurant of mine in London—and even happier when it worked out that we were eating there!
Saturday as promised we went to Rob’s (Jan’s boyfriend) spinning class. It was great to get in a early morning sweat session before Megan and I headed off to Auckland. Though I may not have needed it because we did our fair share of walking. Our trip started off late after we sat at the train station for 15 minutes, only to be told, “Don’t you know there are no trains coming through this weekend?’ Well, turns out we didn’t and had to catch a bus. When we finally got into the city, we decided we wanted to first check out a view of the city from the SkyTower- this needle nosed tower that I’ve been seeing from Swanson. One would think this would be an easy task as it is the biggest building in the city, bigger than even the Eiffel Tower as we later learned. But not on this day—we walked to the top of this really steep hill(a 10-15 minute walk) before we turned around and realized we’d walked right past it. When we finally made it there, we got our tickets and went up. The view from up there was amazing and we were able to see all of Auckland and the surrounding areas. There were also people who were bungee jumping off the tower and we watched a few of those jumps.
After many photos, we walked down to Victoria Market to do some shopping (got lots of souvenirs!) and finished the day at the waterfront with a Guinness at an Irish bar. Our traveling adventures weren’t over though…the bus we took home apparently wasn’t the same one and we didn’t realize this till the bus driver physically turned around and asked me, “where are you trying to go” and then “we already passed it.” So he dropped us off in some dodgy area and we decided to take our chances with a 20 minute walk home. After successfully making it home, we were definitely tired and needed rest before our day on Sunday.
Sunday we left at 8:15am to catch the ferry to Rongatoto Island. This is actually a volcano and we spent the day hiking to the top. The vie w was well worth the two hour climb. We also took a stop off at some caves. There are no shops on this island, so we enjoyed a bag lunch at the top and then walked around the rim and down to a bay which was very beautiful and peaceful. Then it was time to hike the two hours around the side of the island to the ferry. All in all, about four hours of walking made for a very tired Sarah and a good end to the weekend. I can’t wait to see what adventures next weekend will hold!

Happy Friday

Happy Friday! Or Thursday in the USA…that still is so weird to me. I’ve dealt with time difference before, but talking to someone who is living a totally different day just is odd to me-sometimes I feel like I’m in a time warp. After I wrote my first blog, I realized there were so many other things I could include about schools in New Zealand that I have observed so far, so I guess this is an extension of that…after my first week of classes I’ve noticed many differences.

First, schools in New Zealand seem to be much more laid back than schools in the United States. I came here equipped with my nice skirts and sweater vests and am definitely an odd ball. Today I came to school in board shorts, a fleece, and flip-flops. Though it was a planning day for me, but I still felt a little odd…but I’ll definitely be dressing down in the following weeks. The students in my class are required to wear uniforms, though the students in the lower grades do not.

The school itself is also not like I’ve seen before. Instead of having all the classrooms connected like the schools we have in the United States, there are classrooms all over the school grounds. For example, our classroom is connected to the computer lab and the library. Then to get to the office or staff room which are connected, we have to go outside and around the corner. One of the playgrounds is out one of our other windows and there are classrooms on the other sides of it. The school has the equivalent of grades K-8…and they are dispersed all over. This has its advantages and disadvantages. First, to some extent they are able to separate ages groups into different areas of the school. I’ve seen this done by putting different levels on different floors of the school, but this is just horizontally spread out. I suppose this would also help with noise from other classrooms, but I also see students always peering out their windows to see the traffic between these segments. It is nice that all the classes have many windows this way and a door outside to get in a fresh breeze.

The day gets off to a later start than previous schools I’ve been at and the first bell rings in at 9am. That has been great for me to get to sleep in a bit and still get in a morning run. Being five minutes from school also helps with this as there isn’t the Marquette Interchange to fight with anymore. The day is divided into three blocks of time. In the morning we do spelling, handwriting, reading, etc. Then around 11ish we have “morning tea.” This is a 40 minute break where the kids can go out and play and eat a snack and teachers normally stroll in and out of the staff room for tea, coffee, and to chat. Then we resume classes till a little after 1pm when they get another 40 minutes for lunch. Then we have our third block of time from 2-3pm. It definitely makes the day go by quickly. On Tuesdays my class gets on a bus at about 10am and we go to another school for their “tech”- this is where the students spend six weeks in each of the following areas: sewing, cooking, metals, music, woodworking, and art. That means Tuesdays are a day for planning for teachers in our age group as the students spend the large part of the day at this school.

Today I got to do some planning with my cooperating teacher, which also gets me excited about teaching (of course it would take organizing things to get me pumped!). We are going to be starting a Persuasive unit next week till the remainder of the year (the end of the school year is December 20^th) and will also be looking at advertising with that. That seems like something totally up my alley…with wanting at one point in life to go into that and hopefully the three years I spent at the advertising agency will have done me some good!! So next week I start by doing all the morning activities and then Wednesday I will launch into advertising. I’m just a little nervous about this group of boys who must have Senior-itis or something. If I get them engaged in what I’m doing it will be amazing!

Now I’m off to have dinner with my host family!! Have a good weekend!!

My first week in New Zealand

So it has been almost one week in New Zealand and as always during this time I’m having mixed feelings. The culture shock here has not been as great as the last time that I was abroad. Swanson, the city where I am staying, feels a lot like rural England to me, so it hasn’t taken too much time to get acquainted with things in general. Thank god for sleeping pills because I slept most of the 12 hour journey here and didn’t experience too much jet lag.
Our town is very quaint. I’m staying a five minute walk from the school, which is very convenient. It is nice because many people also live close to the school. The other student teacher from Wisconsin, Meagan, lives just down the road with one of the teachers, and a few of my students also live in the area. My host family is one of the families who and the school. Jan’s son (my host mom) is 6 years old. He is really funny and very curious about me and conscientious about where I am at all times. He still has not caught on to my name though, so I often here things like, “mom, where is the student teacher going” or “mom, what did you just say to the student teacher?” It is quite funny how curious he is. I was talking to Brian on the phone a few days ago and playing mindless games on my computer while doing so. All the sudden I felt a presence and thought the cat had come into my room. I looked next to me and there was Cory, chin propped in his elbows, watching my game. He is very into my computer, I-pod, and chewing gum of all things. He is always asking me to use those three things. So far we've also had a few visits to the different beaches since we came on a holiday weekend--but it is very windy and kind of cold at the moment, so we didn't stay longer than to snap a few photos. Once again I get a D for my packing skills and I've been permanently living in my brown fleece (thank god for last mintue stops at Target!).
I’m both excited and nervous about teaching my class. The classes here are mostly two grades combined. I have 11 and 12 year olds or years 7 and 8 as they say here. They had a holiday on Monday so I am just starting day three of classes. It has been a very interesting experience so far, but I’ve been told by many that I’m in a difficult class which of course makes a shy person like me immediately scared. However, some of this has diminished since talking to the some of the student. Yesterday at lunch a group of them swarmed me and began asking all sorts of questions about the United States—have I seen famous people, what’s my first name, do I see snakes where I live, do I go camping where I live, have I been to New York, etc. There interest made me excited and also to share with them a PowerPoint that I made about home. And I’m definitely glad to see that my previous worry that I wouldn’t understand them with their accent is not true J.
It was also great to see that the activities in my class are all student centered activities. It is like many of my classes and textbooks from last year at Stritch have come to life. I’m seeing differentiation, multiple intelligence incorporated, and lots of student choices. For example, I was amazed by the preparation the teachers put into getting ready for their country exploration. They are using Inquiry methods for teaching at Swanson and right now my class is in the Acquiring Knowledge phase. The teachers in this grade level made bulletin boards for various countries/continents around the world. The students are currently on a “Swanson World Tour.” They each were given a passport that has their name and a place for each area of the world they visit. It is their job to go to a board and grab an “itinerary” which is a sheet with questions that they will learn by reading different parts of the board. Then when they have finished that and any activities that are associated (i.e. in Africa they make beaded necklaces, in Japan they do writing on tissue paper), they have to make a postcard home and tell the person they are writing to about the things they learned in the area of the world that they just visited. Then they also have to down a question about something more that they would like to know about this area of the world. When these are both done to the teacher’s satisfaction, she stamps their passport and they are able to move on to another board/part of the world. From here they will move on to researching one of the five questions they ask. It is really great to see the students all independently working at different points in this process. I’m only worried about the classroom management that goes into keeping many of these students focused. There definitely seem to be some students who use this independence to their advantage and are doing other tasks. This will definitely be a challenge for me and a difference from my last placement where there was no tolerance for this.

Other subjects are also student centered as well. In fact, the students don’t even have textbooks. In spelling each student gets their own list of spelling words based on words they got wrong in a test they were given. The students have a list of possible choices for activities that they can do (they do about 8 activities with the words each week) with these words and are tested on them Friday. These activities are even in three levels based on the students’ level. Finally, homework is given on Mondays and the students are supposed to independently work to complete it by Friday. Mrs. Thompson, my cooperating teacher, has two different homework levels. For those students who are exceptional in their quality and timeliness in homework, they have a choice of doing a different homework sheet with more enrichment activities. I’m very excited to be a part of all the great things going on in this classroom.
Last night Meagan, the other student teacher, and I started planning our weekend activities for the time in which we are here. Upcoming activities include going to these caves and rafting inside them and my favorite, seeing Lord of the Rings tour Hobbiton. That has gotten me also excited as I look forward to getting out and seeing different parts of New Zealand. This weekend I'm going out for dinner with my host family (Jan) and her friends. Then Saturday morning we are going to take her boyfriend's spinning class which should be a nice change from running up the steep hills surrounding Swanson.

Then Megan and I are off to Auckland for the day to see what the city has to offer. We haven't been there except for flying into the airport, so it should be fun to explore. Finally, Sunday I’m taking a day trip with Meagan and her host mom, Rachel (Cory’s teacher at school) to Raugitoto Island. Hopefully the weather will warm up and cooperate!!