Tuesday March 20th, 2018:
Today was our first day in Crewe after arriving at 12:30 AM that morning. After only getting a couple hours of sleep due to jet lag, we headed off to our school via taxi. It was very exciting to finally be in Crewe after waiting for so long to get here. Once we arrived at the school, we were welcomed by the friendliest staff members and then instructed to sign in. Their sign in was very high text because it involved us signing in on a special monitor. America definitely needs this system because it was extremely easy and allowed them to log in who had arrived that day and if anyone had not departed yet. After signing in, we started our tour with the wonderful Nigel Pearson who is a celebrity at this school. He was constantly high fiving each of the students as he passed by them and saying good morning in German to them. It was so cool to hear the students speak in German so fluently. Nigel also interacted with a student who is part of the special ed program who did the cutest thing to show us his smile with sign language. We also met another student from Year 6 who even shook our hands and welcomed us. It was so great to be welcomed by such respectful students. We continued on our tour throughout the school that was split up by their Nursery (Kindergarten?- 1st grade), Level 1 (1st-3rd grade) and Level 2 (4th-6th grade). Each year had about 2 classrooms each and it was a very open environment with large windows that you could peak into rooms through. Once we finished our quick tour with Nigel, he placed us in different year 5 classrooms.
The year 5 classrooms were split up by a behavior classroom and a classroom with a newer teacher. Stefanie took the more challenging class and I took the class with the newer teacher. In this class, they were working on something called a warning tale, where they warned someone not to do something and had to come up with problems and solutions. They used a graphic organizer, which was called a box up. It broke their writing down by paragraph and made it a lot easier for the students to follow. I was definitely in a bit of culture shock during this observation because they spelled some words differently and I really wanted to correct them but I didn’t want to confuse them at all. I will have to brush up on words such as learnt, colour, and many other words. These students also had amazing penmanship for their age as they all wrote in cursive. They are all so respectful and proper that it was a great eye opening experience. After, we observed for a little bit, we went to the auditorium for a school wide presentation on Easter by churches together. This school is religious and they have references to religion in multiple parts of the school. The presentation was very kid friendly and fun to watch and it involved Dr. Who’s Tetris machine.
After that, we had lunch that we chose once we arrived. At this school, we have three choices of meals and I chose the jacket potato which consisted of cheese, beans and we had an apple crisp dessert. During lunch we met someone from our university named Ben who we had lunch with us and answered any questions that we had at the moment. Once lunch was over, Ben showed us the route that we would take everyday to avoid using taxi’s. He gave us a lot of information about the town and some of the best places to go. He then brought us to purchase bikes for rent to have during our stay. The bikes were at a donation center that helps many homeless people in the area. After departing from our time with Ben, Stefanie and I spent a whole afternoon in Crewe center where we immersed ourselves in the culture. We bought Starbucks, went to a store that was like walmart, had fish, chips and tea and rode bikes all around Crewe to find our way back to the University. It was an overall fabulous day and I love Crewe so very much! I’m so excited to find out what grade I will be teaching and to experience everything else that England has to offer!