As a teacher, it is important to find different ways to connect with your students and the community outside of school, especially when you want to give people more opportunities to practice speaking another language. It's doubly important to do so when you're living in a new country, because you expose yourself to new people and activities that you might not have found out about otherwise. To do just that, I started an afternoon English club for students and teachers to come play games and hang out or celebrate American holidays. We have had photo scavenger hunts and hilarious conversations. We even went out for pizza and to a movie once.
This club is great because it is nice to find ways to share some of your own cultural customs when you are iving in another country where people share so much of their culture with you on a daily basis. Baking traditional American sweets is one way that I have attempted to reach out to the community. So far, I have baked chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookies and Mississippi mud cake. This coming week for Halloween, I will be making dirt dessert and caramel apples to eat while we carve pumpkins. I think it will be a lot of fun and a new experience for a lot of the students and teachers. In the Czech Republic, people don't really celebrate Halloween. Instead, they celebrate All Souls' Day, or Památka zesnulých, on November 2nd.
