27. Activity night

On Thursday we had a fun night.  Thanks to Brooke for sharing her pictures with me.  The students at Rosendal Ungdomskule are somewhat spoiled I would say.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  They just are.  We had an activity night.  So all 9 of us student teachers went over to Rosendal at 7:15 to plan the night's activities.  At 7:30, the teachers had prepared hamburgers for us and we were talking and playing ping pong with the students.

It was funny because the tables were segregated.  I mean, what can you expect though.  These are middle school boys and girls.

25: Return again

After the weekend trip to Oslo we made it back to Rosendal.  The bus ride was long.  It was also very beautiful.

Rosendal in the morning

I would like to focus on a teaching strategy for today.  This was one of the teaching strategies that was done in the English class today.  Today was the second day that we have been on the topic of global warming so they are somewhat accustomed to the words and the vocabulary that is associated with the idea.  So in order to organize somewhat all of these vocabulary words the pupils were asked to make ‘mind maps.’  A mind map is on a piece of paper where it has the main idea in the center of the paper: Global Warming.  Then attached to that will be other words: climate change, recycling, etc.  Then words could be attached to those words.  Recycling paper or recycling plastic.  It was a good way to see what they students were understanding about the text that they were reading.  If there was a word that I was particularly impressed by (ignorant) then I could ask the student what the word means or how does it fit in where ever it is.  Students were also encouraged to discuss their thoughts about global warming with their partners and the map was a good reminder of things to remember and talk about.

It was nice to get a ride home from school today from Stein.  He just happened to be at the Husnes shopping center when we were walking to the bus station.  Brooke and I were very happy to see him.  Sarah also got a ride since she got there just in time.  We had a pleasant conversation and the drive didn't seem like it took that long.

24c: Oslo - Day 3 - Sunday

Nate woke up and cooked breakfast.  He cooked 6 eggs and a bunch of bacon and shared it with me.  After, I ran to the bus stop to see what time the bus would come so that we wouldn’t miss the bus to go to the center of the city and to go to church. Here is the schedule of the bus times:

Advertisement on the metro

Nate, Sarah, Julia, Megan and I left the house and started on our way to church.  We rode the bus and then made our way onto the metro.  Pretty quick after I got on the metro I noticed that there was this lady that was looking at me.  There was something familiar about the way that the girl looked.  A little while into the trip somebody talked.  The lady was going to church with her husband just like we were.  It was pretty funny that I could tell that she was going to church right about the time that we got on the train.  We had a nice little conversation and then followed them off the metro and then up the street up to church.  It was nice that we had run into them because then we were led to church rather than trying to find it.  We would have found it but this was so much easier.

24b: Oslo - Day 2

Since I had already been to all of the museums I didn’t have anyone to hangout with for most of the day.  All of the others girl do other things on Friday and so they still wanted to go to those museums.  I don’t blame them.  I enjoyed going to the museums.  So I was there all by myself.  I decided that I was going to go down to the dock and check out the place there.  My Oslo Card was still good so I used that to get on a bus there.

24a: Oslo - Norwegian museums

We left late on Thursday night (11:15 pm) to go to Oslo. We were on the bus forever.  After transferring buses 2 times we were finally it to Oslo at about 7 am.  I found that the more comfortable way to travel was laying sideways on two seats.  Then I would put my back on those two seats with my head towards the window and feet towards the aisle.  Then put my beanie on with my music plugged in and hope for the best.

There have been multiple times that I have taken long bus rides and they have always been the same.  I feel like I am on the bus forever.  If I try and sleep normal sitting it usually doesn’t work.  I need to lay across the two seats and try that.  The interesting thing is that I keep forgetting that each time I get on a new bus.

We waited around a little bit in the bus station because we really weren’t sure what to do.  Nobody was really taking charge either.  Also we all didn’t have to do the same thing.  We did have a little bit of time to figure out what we wanted to do though since there aren’t many things open at 7 am.

23: Thursday

I really enjoyed my English class today.  We talked about global warming which was a topic that Matte said that she didn’t know that much about.  So I was a big help today.  Matte also talked about how having me in the classroom made her be more careful with English and making sure that she was speaking grammatically correct.  We will continue to talk about global warming for the next week.

The other thing that I liked about Matte’s class is that it was more typical of an American classroom.  It didn’t seem that there were students that were goofing off during instruction.  Matte also waited for the students to quiet down before she started to teach.  She demanded their attention and because she demanded they gave her their attention.  I thought it was interesting how much different the students are given a different teacher because the students aren’t very different given a different subject from the same teacher.

22: Testing, Biking

Selfie by the Fjord

Today the 10th graders had a math test like the whole day.  I still have a bunch of questions about it that hopefully I will be able to ask Erlend tomorrow.  Wednesdays always ends late because of 'outdoor education' at the end.  So today ended by having the students training by running around the track and other running exercises.

Upon arriving home I decided that I wanted to go on a bike ride because I like riding bikes better than I like running.  So that is what I did.