Hi everyone!
I am Marie, the other French volunteer in
Pułtusk this year. You don’t know me very much because it is the first
time I am writing about my project, but you probably have already heard about me
in some other events, like language cafés or cooking sessions!
I am mainly working in a kindergarten, Przedszkole
Miejskie nr 4, with kids from 3 to 6 years old. The children with whom I spend
most of my time are the oldest ones but I have of course many occasions to be
with the others!
My main task – the reason of me being there – is to be with the children. It can take
several forms: helping them doing exercises, eating together with them, listening
to them – even if at the beginning I could not understand a single word – playing
with them, making drawings for them... Then
they try to draw the same, it is like a drawing lesson without me teaching
anything formally… Just them observing and doing! 🎨 And of course, I help the teacher for more practical
things (serving the meals, taking care of the material, looking after the kids
etc.).
As you might have understood, my active presence is a
central component of my project but of course, it is better if I can bring
concrete things as well: for instance, presenting differences and similarities between
our cultures or making some animations linked with the topics the children see
in the kindergarten.
That’s how I did – of course – a presentation about France and the place where I
come from, to give the kids a better idea of where I grew up, and I did one, more
recently, about dinosaurs.
I prepared a PowerPoint with pictures to explain why
they are called dinosaurs (= terrible lizards), when and in which environment they
used to live, how big they could be, the reasons why scientists think they disappeared, how
we discovered them (thanks to fossils) and I gave some examples of dinosaurs –
typical ones: diplodocus, tyrannosaur, triceratops, pterodactyl, brachiosaur and stegosaur. To make it interactive, I asked them questions about the
pictures they could see and I did a little test at the end, to see if they
remembered the names of the dinosaurs. 😊 Some of them were already well informed!
But I can already see your question coming: my Polish
is quite limited so HOW did I manage to explain all that to the kids???
The answer is quite simple: I wrote a small text with
easy sentences in English and a Polish friend (maybe you already know Iga!) helped
me to translate it into Polish. Then I trained with the pronunciation and I did
the presentation with the text in my hand… and that’s it!
I really had fun preparing and performing this
presentation, and what made me happy is that the kids enjoyed it and were
involved in it. After that, I had prepared some colourings for them. And the day
after, the kids of my class painted dinosaurs cut in paper rolls:
It was a very nice animation and I would like to
continue preparing such ones in the future!
Having contact with the children, learning from each
other and having fun together are the things that matter to me.
I learn so much with them. Firstly, of course, the language: Polish. If I want to
communicate with them, I have to be active quite quickly in the language. With the
time, I notice that I can make more and more sentences and understand more
things. And I am in total immersion the whole day so I am used to hear the
music of the Polish language…
Then – and it is quite important – I am learning a lot
about human relations. Indeed, due to the barrier of the language that makes it
essential to develop such abilities, I noticed some time ago that contact with
people, at least with children, seemed easier to me. It is a very precious
knowledge! I hope I will be able to develop it more in the future.
Thank you for your presence, dear reader! I hope to see you
later again! Here is the end of this little contribution…
All the best,
Marie
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