"scream and translate"...now I have a phrase for it!

After the no-shower disappointment, I had breakfast at a little coffee shop down the street from the PC office and then went to the Young Learners manual meeting (YLMM?). Tetiana gave me a chocolate bar as a birthday present, and she'd brought us pastries from the coffee shop where I'd eaten breakfast. If I'd only known, I could have saved myself a few hryvnia. :)

The meeting was good...there were 3 teacher trainers and only two primary teachers, which I think is a skewed dynamic, so we're talking about trying to get some more PCVs who actually teach in on the project. But we decided to make our manual based on the National Curriculum objectives, rather than on any one particular textbook series, especially as we'd like to steer classes away from bookwork and more towards communicative activities.

When I was describing my 4th form on Monday, one of the girls was like, "Oh, the teacher was using the 'Scream and translate' method," which made me laugh. I didn't realize that there was an "official" term for it...SaT. :)

The meeting got out a little after noon, and I wandered around Kyiv during the afternoon. I went to Globus, the big underground mall, and felt very ovewhelmed, very unfashionable, very overweight, and very poor after looking at the clothes. Bah. I then wandered over past the cathedrals down Andriivsky Street, planning to go to the Mikhail Bulgakov museum, but apparently it wasn't open for visitors because it was already full with a group from Moscow. Or something like that. So I came back to the office to discover that we had no electricity and hence no Internet. Hung out in a comfy chair for a bit, and then Shannon, another PCV, and Pasha, her boyfriend (who's Ukrainian), and I walked down to McDonalds for ice cream, and when we came back, the power was back on. So now I can waste time on the computer!