Student teaching em Rio de Janiero: Shop, beach, samba!

Alright.... a lot has happened since my last blog and it's 11pm right now. I'll try to make this quick and to the point.

Friday: My new friend Vivie took my roomies and I to the Botafogo mall. She said it is the smallest mall in Rio, it had eight floors. These Brazilians like to shop! And eat, about 3 of the floors were strictly places to eat! The view of the bay from the top floor of the mall took my breath away.

See.

Friday night Vivie took us to her friend birthday party at Drink Cafe by our house. My CT came too, which was great. I got to talk and get to know her more (kind of hard at school with trying to teach the little ones and all).

Saturday: We went to Copacabana with Vive (we love Vive!!!) We went around 10, Amanda and I walked around and waited for Vive at the Metro while Caitlin and Claire soaked up the sun. When we got to the beach the first thing we did was buy umbrellas! It was soooooo hot by 11am! (obviously, it's Rio!) even though I applyed SPF 50 and hid under an umbrella, I still got slightly fried (Sorry mom/sister:[ ). I think the sun wiped us all out because we didn't do anything that night.

The beach, and yes. Men wear those...

Sunday: We slept in until noon and then went to the Hippie Fair in Impanema. We actualy got pretty brave and took a taxi to the metro in Copacabana, then took the metro to Impanema square. We shopped at this fair from 12:30 until 4:00! It was amazing and half of my gifts for my people back home are bought (for cheap!) Yippie! I got such authentic Rio gifts, but I can't tell you what because it's a surprise! ;) The fair was so popular, we ran into so many English speaking people! It was great! We even made random friends and may be going to the beach with them later this week. Rio is so friendly (People back home, I am being safe and not naive so stop worrying). Sunday night Amanda and I took a walk and an Americano Express Blockbuster. Holy jackpot! We found Disney movies for 12.99 reais, translation= Pocahontis and Alice and Wonderland for 7 US bucks a piece! Yup, Rio is amazing ;)

Today: I taught my first lesson today and I gotta say, I went well. My lesson was on commas and using them correctly in a series. I brought in objects from home and put them in a bag. For the lesson I had the children pick the objects from the bags one by one and as we did that we formed sentences. For example, "I found a pen, a sock, and belt." I wrote the sentence on the board with no commas and had the students copy the sentence in their English notebooks with the correct punctuation. May not sound amazing, but they loved it. They loved seeing my things and some of the objects were pictures so it was a "getting to know me" exercise as well. It was also great because all of these students are ESL (English as a Second Language) Their first language is Portuguese and two of them are new and speak only Spanish. Having real life objects made it fun for everyone and easier to understand! Of course there are things I would change, but I think it went well for my first go at it. It was funny beacause some things I had were so American and I had no idea. My class didn't know what mouthwash was and when I pulled out a flip flop and started writing that on the board their faces were so confused. They were saying, "flip flop, what's a flip flop? That's a sandal Mzzzz. Hawke". PS, the way they say Ms. is so cute I could die.

After school the librarian told us about a samba show, so we went thinking we would see some authentic dancing. Well, we did. It was not like a show that you sit down and watch. This was like a pre Carnival extravaganza. We were in downtown Rio (for the first time) and seeing tall, amazing old buildings and in these buildings we were catching glimps of Carnival floats. This "show" was just one big celebration!There was music and food, people dancing, and in the buildings next to this "show" was where the floats were being worked on for this year.