Jake has some explaining to do

Friday, 11th of May. Day 6.

So, after getting an updated timetable yesterday with more classes on it, we were scheduled to teach year 8, year 7 and year 9 today, in that order. We requested more classes, as done in previous years, as we did not feel like we had enough, and the students from year 8 would be missing out on 2 of their classes due to school holidays.

In the year 8 class, we planned to play the same word game with them that we played with the year 9 students, (see previous post.) It was a sunny day, so we took them out onto the grass before getting them to form a circle. Below is one of the stories that they formed.

A fairy was sitting with his Japanese girlfriend, waiting for a big dragon to come and destroy the whole forest. When it came they started talking about his girlfriend, that was invisible. The dragon stopped destroying to talk about their girlfriend that was also invisible. So now they are best friends. Jake appeared to be jealous because he didn't have an invisible girlfriend, but he wanted to marry Mary, who was a mermaid that came from the ocean, but their love was impossible because she was invisible. So, he married another mermaid that lived under the school that was in love with the hospital. They were married until the dragon separated them because he wanted to burn the school.

Jake has some explaining to do.

Following this, our timetable said that we were supposed to teach year 7, however their teacher, Clive, wanted them to work on their presentations for the year 6's. We have not had a class with year 7 yet but hopefully this will change next week.

We had 2 hours to kill before class with year 9, so we wandered down to a local café for some croissants. We ordered a ham and cheese croissant each, with a hot chocolate. We got our croissants, but what we thought was a hot chocolate beverage was actually just a whole cup of melted chocolate, which obviously was not for drinking. It turned out to actually be a pretty good mistake, because we got to order a second croissant each, specifically to dip it into the chocolate. Not even going to mention all the other things we've been eating since we got here. Thank God we haven't got a weighing scales.

Class with the year 9 group consisted of Jake and I going through a PowerPoint, with headings such as 'Character,' 'Setting,' 'Plot,' 'Conflict' and 'show, don't tell.' We explained that these elements are essential for story writing and told them to keep the points that we made in mind when they are writing their own stories. The last 2 slides of the PowerPoint each had a picture. The first picture was of a scary character and the second picture was of a location that could be used in a horror story. With these images on the screen, we did a descriptive exercise with the students. In regard to the character, we asked them to give a physical description, a description of what their personality may be like, what the character may be thinking, etc. Furthermore, we explained how to use the 5 senses in their writing. In regard to the location we showed them, what could they see? If they were there, what do they think they would hear? What do they think they would smell?

After the school day ended, we decided to search Alpedrete for someone to fix my bag strap and to try and gather photos for our quest. We eventually found a tailor that took my bag to fix for me, after going into about three different shops and asking for directions twice. And on our search for photos of bare trees, per the year 9 students' request, I ended up buying a new bracelet with a bare tree on it instead. But we still got photos of other things we needed, the most interesting being the Alpedrete library.

We then decided to stay at home for a little while before going back out on a midnight walk in the dark, attempting to get more photos for our classes. We had great fun attempting to take creepy photos for our horror class, with Jake as the model.