Hi everybody:
How nice to hear from you!, I would like to wish you the happiest Chistmas with your families and I hope all your dreams and wishes come true in 2008.
FELIZ NAVIDAD Y AÑO 2008.
Best wishes
Noelia
Sunday, 23 December 2007
Dear all!
Many thanks for your seasonal greetings and wishes, nice e-cards and interesting links... In my turn I wish you all great time with your friends and families, merry Christmas and happy New Year! Enclosed is my tiny present for you...
Love,
Svetlana
In the weeks leeding up to Christmas homes in Germany are filled with the delightful smells of spicy cookies. Making them througout the Christmas season is one of the old family traditions. As a small present for you I attach a recipe of „Winter hedgehog“ cookies – easy to make, fun to look at, unlikely to let you put on weight…
Dough
150 g lowfat quark
6 tbsp Oil
1 Egg
1 pinch of salt
4 tbsp sugar
300 g flour
½ package of baking powder
For ornament
1 egg yolk
raisins
almonds cut into strips
The making of…
Step 1: Stir quark, oil, egg, salt and sugar in a mixer.
Step 2: Mix flour with baking powder and add it to the quark mixture.
Step 3. You may add even more flour (1 or 2 tbsp) in case the dough is still clammily
Step 4 Apportion the dough into 12 pieces and shape small balls (let your memories of a hedgehog body inspire you)
Step 5 Brush the “hedgehogs” with egg yolk.
Many thanks for your seasonal greetings and wishes, nice e-cards and interesting links... In my turn I wish you all great time with your friends and families, merry Christmas and happy New Year! Enclosed is my tiny present for you...
Love,
Svetlana
In the weeks leeding up to Christmas homes in Germany are filled with the delightful smells of spicy cookies. Making them througout the Christmas season is one of the old family traditions. As a small present for you I attach a recipe of „Winter hedgehog“ cookies – easy to make, fun to look at, unlikely to let you put on weight…
Dough
150 g lowfat quark
6 tbsp Oil
1 Egg
1 pinch of salt
4 tbsp sugar
300 g flour
½ package of baking powder
For ornament
1 egg yolk
raisins
almonds cut into strips
The making of…
Step 1: Stir quark, oil, egg, salt and sugar in a mixer.
Step 2: Mix flour with baking powder and add it to the quark mixture.
Step 3. You may add even more flour (1 or 2 tbsp) in case the dough is still clammily
Step 4 Apportion the dough into 12 pieces and shape small balls (let your memories of a hedgehog body inspire you)
Step 5 Brush the “hedgehogs” with egg yolk.
Dear friends,
I'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
I recently found a nice BBC film "Pictures of Britain" and I'd like to share one of series "Romantic North".
Hope it will remind you the daffodils and the splendid time in the Lake District.
You can download it from here:
www.ukok.org/vid/
Click right mouse button and choose "Save target as …". You can also use a download manager, e.g. ReGet.
Wish you peaceful holiday and the pleasant Year 2008!
Regards,
Sergei
I'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
I recently found a nice BBC film "Pictures of Britain" and I'd like to share one of series "Romantic North".
Hope it will remind you the daffodils and the splendid time in the Lake District.
You can download it from here:
www.ukok.org/vid/
Click right mouse button and choose "Save target as …". You can also use a download manager, e.g. ReGet.
Wish you peaceful holiday and the pleasant Year 2008!
Regards,
Sergei
Hello, everyone. I hope you are all well and that the coming year will be a very happy one for you. Click on the link for some seasonal reading practice!
http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=1360036169209&source=jl999
Best wishes,
Helen
http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=1360036169209&source=jl999
Best wishes,
Helen
Monday, 22 October 2007
Rania’s Third Space
Hi everybody!
I finally sat down to put on paper –rather on screen- what this third space means for me. I’m really surprised it took me all that time to get started. I usually jump into the things I have to do. But this time I kept postponing it. This has surely been a very busy period yet again I was a bit numb to express in words all the great feelings I had during my stay in Lancaster. Correction. I should say I still have because I still carry this third space thing with me months later in my ‘natural habitat’.
This continuation is even more evident since I started teaching my classes again. Everyday I use something of my experience there. I’m still in my third space. It’s like a parallel universe. I really needed this course. I felt I had to plunge into the British culture, contemporary life, authentic situations, real-life language. And I got it all, plus the excitement of sharing the same anxieties with people who are so different.
I cherish the time we spent chatting in our kitchen or walking around Lancaster. There was a double procedure: explore a place and at the same time connect with people. I also treasure the time I spent there on my own absorbing pictures and impressions analyzing feelings and experiences. I distinctly remember the point I started thinking in English when for example I was getting ready to go out choosing what to wear or organizing what I had to do for the day. Ah! I also found amusing that on my first day there, while shopping, I addressed Tanya in greek. You see, as she was not English she had to understand me. But it was all Greek to her.
I didn’t want to read the other people’s accounts because I wanted to be as unaffected by their attitudes as possible. However, I think that it’s difficult to have 26 totally different interpretations of the same experience because we all share the same ground. English is not our mother tongue, we all love teaching it, we all care about getting better at it and motivating our students is an important issue for all of us.
Teaching is a difficult job but teaching a foreign language is really hard because the subject you teach is also the tool for teaching it. I’m sure this course has helped us a lot to deal with the uniqueness of our trade.
Thursday, 20 September 2007
Helen's reflections
My response below is made up of reflections on running a Comenius course in general and reflections on this particular one.
General reflections
I love the Comenius course! First of all, it’s very exciting receiving applications throughout the year from all over Europe –Estonia, Bulgaria, Spain, Greece … - daily evidence of the new Europe in action. Then, I enjoy beginning to get to know the potential participants through my correspondence with them. I learn perhaps that someone is bringing a husband or that someone has been here before and knows the area already or that someone else has heard about the course from a friend who enjoyed it. These exchanges of greetings should maybe not take priority in my workload but they always do! Meeting people on the first day is therefore like meeting up with pen-pals, though it never fails to amaze me how wrong I have usually been in visualizing what people are going to look like! (I wonder what image people build up of me?!)
Putting together the course programme is not an easy job, as it involves liaising with a large number of people, booking trips, writing contracts, finding host families and, sometimes last on the list, preparing my own teaching! I have a constant awareness that this is a once-in-three-years experience for people and I do take that very seriously.
Anyway, it’s great when it all begins to come together and I can start to feel confident that we have something to offer, though I’m never quite sure whether the balance is going to be right for particular groups. Some want a lot of methodology; some want more culture. I think we’re maybe beginning to get the mix about right, though I wish I felt we had more to offer that was really new.
What is really new?? Well, maybe this is! Thanks largely to Tanya, we have our own exploratory third space and who knows what might come of it!
Particular reflections
The planning went fairly smoothly this time and I am learning to live with the ambiguity of guest speakers not getting back to me to confirm arrangements until the last minute! (I’m sorry we didn’t manage one of the MPs for your group. We did have Tim Farron MP on the second course and he was very popular. However, they didn’t have a school visit and I think that’s more important.) The ambiguity I can’t learn to live with is to do with whether the college – now university – services will be up to scratch: will the campus rooms be cleaned, will the coffee be on time, will the food be nice … Things are improving on this front but it’s still not perfect and I get quite cross when things go wrong!
This year I had Hai Ling working with me for the first time, which was nice and indeed a cultural learning experience for both of us. I also love working with Krista and have the fullest confidence in her ability to do a really good job on courses. Sadly, she wasn’t too well during this first course and you didn’t really get to know her so well.
As for you, well, you were great. You were all so positive and forthcoming and I felt you were really orientated towards working together and making the most of the experience. I also have to say that I have never had such wonderful presents at the end of a course! I loved hearing about your countries and the work you do in your classrooms. We saw some great examples of technology in action and indeed I think this blog will give us ideas for our teaching. I enjoyed having new nationalities in the group – first time for Russian speakers, first Bulgarian and first Dane! First time also for accompanying family members and I liked that. I particularly enjoyed our day in the Lake District and was pleased to read in the feedback forms that most of you did, too. The moment that touched me most, and made me cry, was when Carmen said at the end that she had known from the beginning that it would be a good course.
I do hope you enjoyed it. I certainly did. I look forward to reading more postings!
General reflections
I love the Comenius course! First of all, it’s very exciting receiving applications throughout the year from all over Europe –Estonia, Bulgaria, Spain, Greece … - daily evidence of the new Europe in action. Then, I enjoy beginning to get to know the potential participants through my correspondence with them. I learn perhaps that someone is bringing a husband or that someone has been here before and knows the area already or that someone else has heard about the course from a friend who enjoyed it. These exchanges of greetings should maybe not take priority in my workload but they always do! Meeting people on the first day is therefore like meeting up with pen-pals, though it never fails to amaze me how wrong I have usually been in visualizing what people are going to look like! (I wonder what image people build up of me?!)
Putting together the course programme is not an easy job, as it involves liaising with a large number of people, booking trips, writing contracts, finding host families and, sometimes last on the list, preparing my own teaching! I have a constant awareness that this is a once-in-three-years experience for people and I do take that very seriously.
Anyway, it’s great when it all begins to come together and I can start to feel confident that we have something to offer, though I’m never quite sure whether the balance is going to be right for particular groups. Some want a lot of methodology; some want more culture. I think we’re maybe beginning to get the mix about right, though I wish I felt we had more to offer that was really new.
What is really new?? Well, maybe this is! Thanks largely to Tanya, we have our own exploratory third space and who knows what might come of it!
Particular reflections
The planning went fairly smoothly this time and I am learning to live with the ambiguity of guest speakers not getting back to me to confirm arrangements until the last minute! (I’m sorry we didn’t manage one of the MPs for your group. We did have Tim Farron MP on the second course and he was very popular. However, they didn’t have a school visit and I think that’s more important.) The ambiguity I can’t learn to live with is to do with whether the college – now university – services will be up to scratch: will the campus rooms be cleaned, will the coffee be on time, will the food be nice … Things are improving on this front but it’s still not perfect and I get quite cross when things go wrong!
This year I had Hai Ling working with me for the first time, which was nice and indeed a cultural learning experience for both of us. I also love working with Krista and have the fullest confidence in her ability to do a really good job on courses. Sadly, she wasn’t too well during this first course and you didn’t really get to know her so well.
As for you, well, you were great. You were all so positive and forthcoming and I felt you were really orientated towards working together and making the most of the experience. I also have to say that I have never had such wonderful presents at the end of a course! I loved hearing about your countries and the work you do in your classrooms. We saw some great examples of technology in action and indeed I think this blog will give us ideas for our teaching. I enjoyed having new nationalities in the group – first time for Russian speakers, first Bulgarian and first Dane! First time also for accompanying family members and I liked that. I particularly enjoyed our day in the Lake District and was pleased to read in the feedback forms that most of you did, too. The moment that touched me most, and made me cry, was when Carmen said at the end that she had known from the beginning that it would be a good course.
I do hope you enjoyed it. I certainly did. I look forward to reading more postings!
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