Sunday, August 19, 2012

New (and Old) Beginnings

This week I returned to the Fulbright International Summer Institute as an alumna to share my experiences with the new group of English Teaching Assistants. Now that I've been in Bulgaria for two years, I keep thinking back to those first couple of weeks in Bansko: adjusting to life in a new place, making wonderful new friends, getting confused all the time by the language (oh wait, that still happens to me every day), and most of all being excited to learn about everything around me. I'm still just as curious as ever about everything Bulgarian, but things seem to move more slowly now. I feel comfortable here in Sofia, and I never would have imagined two years ago that I would be getting ready for yet another year of teaching in Bulgaria.

Meeting the new group of ETAs was a great opportunity to make acquaintances (hopefully many of them will come visit throughout the year!) and also to reflect on my time as a Fulbright grantee. I'm happy to have been able to share some of the best and worst parts of my tenure as an English Teaching Assistant, and I hope that through networking and sharing new experiences, this year's grantees will be even more successful in their projects. By the way, the topic of my presentation was "lesson planning and resources." I know that Maria promised to email all the presentation to the FISI group, but I wanted to also publish it here in case anyone else teaching English to high school students might be interested.

Fulbright ETA Orientation 2012

In the slideshow, I give a rough overview of what ETAs can do in the classroom, an example of a standard lesson plan, 12 activity plans and 9 links to helpful websites.

Now that I'm moving ahead and away from teaching high school, I wish the best of luck to anyone taking on the challenge of working with teens in the language classroom- especially the new ETAs working in Bulgarian foreign language schools. Have a wonderful school year!

4 comments:

  1. Sofia, it was great to meet you as well!  I'm glad that I got to meet you in person after reading your blog getting ready to come to BG!

    Juliana

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  2. Thanks, Sophia! It was great to find another northwest native, and I hope to be able to meet up with you in the city at some point in the next year.

    Ariel

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  3. Thanks, Juliana! It was great meeting you, too, and best of luck with everything in Varna. I hope to be seeng you again soon in Sofia. :)

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  4. Hey Ariel! I hope so, too, and please keep in touch to let me know how things are going in Smolyan!

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