November with Elizabeth

What an exciting month it’s been here in Deauville! As we enter the holiday season, we are surrounded by the beautiful lights and cheer of Christmas time. While we are thinking of our family back at home, we are all counting our blessings and feeling the holiday spirit in other ways.

In Mid-November, I celebrated my 23^rd birthday with a weekend in Paris. Upon my return to school, I received about 30 drawings from my students as a birthday gift. I kept each one of them, and they remind me how much joy the children bring to me with their loving hearts and genuine spirits. Later that week, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a Deauville native, Fanny Hubert-Salmon, who spends a lot of time working in Lexington. I also discovered that Fanny and I have a connection back at home as well, through my dad, and one of her best friends. It was a humbling reminder of how small the world really is.  At Fanny’s home, we shared a delicious meal, with all the American fixins’ we could find. Fanny brought back corn bread mix from the last time she visited Kentucky, we had some makeshift cranberry sauce made from dried cranberries, green beans, sweet potatoes, mac and cheese, homemade rolls and cinnamon butter, and a chocolate hazelnut pie. In lieu of a turkey, which can be hard to find in France, we had a foie gras stuffed chicken. It was delicious. It was so wonderful to connect with someone who knows and loves our hometown so much. We got to talk about Kentucky basketball, and other sports, something I didn’t realized I missed so much until we talked about it. We are all so grateful to Fanny for opening her home to us. It turned what could have been a sad, homesick day into a wonderful experience of love and friendship. I hope that we will be able to continue our friendship upon our return to Lexington.

This past weekend, we also got to share in the illumination celebration in the center plaza of Deauville. Four kilometers of lights in total were strung around the city, decorating the trees and the light posts and forming a beautiful tent of light over the main roundabout in the city. Our students sang a song for the town that they had been practicing for weeks, and then with the push of a big red button, the town was transformed into a beautiful winter wonderland. This next month is sure to bring even more holiday cheer as we celebrate the season with our new friends, and see the delight in our students’ eyes as the magic of Christmas draws nearer.Our day to day life here as a TA in Deauville has settled into a nice routine. There are early days, when we have to be at the school to greet the students before class starts, and there are later days, when we get to grab a few extra winks of sleep. I start my day usually at the nursey school, where the kids treat you as if you are a celebrity walking through their halls. Every time I walk into a room of my students I hear a chorus of, “Elizabet! Elizabet! Hellllllo! ‘Elllooo!” (The ‘th’ at the end of my name is impossible for most of them to pronounce, so we just go with Elizabet.) I start my days with songs usually. Songs that teach greetings, or how to say their name, or even just classic nursery rhymes. I think I sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” about 20 times a week. And then, we learn English through games and stories. Since I teach in the nursey, it’s a lot of me talking, and them playing, but it is an important building block in their English education. On Fridays, they get stickers, usually with English phrases on them, as a reward for a week of hard work. The stickers are a huge hit. Every day, we eat lunch and spend recreation with the kids. I have formed some special bonds with a handful of the kids, and I have learned that seeing the world through their eyes is something that adults often overlook, and because of that, we miss out on a lot of joy and wonder that the world has to offer. After school, the students have after school activities. When we aren’t helping out in the bigger groups, we are each responsible for our own activity. I run the English club every Tuesday, and we play games, make crafts, and watch movies that expose them to some American culture and a little bit of English language. One of their favorite activities was creating Halloween masks, and playing Thanskgiving bingo. They loved it! At the end of our days, we are tired, but we feel fulfilled and satisfied in the role that we are playing in these kids’ language and cultural education.

Until next time! Happy Holidays from Deauville!

                                    -Elizabeth