Once upon a time there was a little girl aged 5, who went to see Santa in her dad's office to sing songs to him with the other kids, to collect the sweets, and to learn if she'd been naughty or nice.
These workplace Santa parties usually mean Santa interviewing the children and evaluating their niceness or naughtiness. Our little girl is not one of those shy children who may even cry when interrogated by the old, sweaty fellow in his rather clumsy red coat in a heated room. So she was brief:
"And guess what Santa, once in the summer when my mum and I were making langos (Hungarian dish), I told mum I wanted to have English lessons and I have been a nice child since my English lessons started."
Yep, and I've been a much better teacher since then, being the lucky one chosen from all the teachers in town to teach her.
I like that
girl a lot.
If we were the same age, I would surely be her keen follower in the kindergarten group and we would get nothing from Santa, we'd be terribly naughty!
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| Ocean in the living room |
Now that I'm 34 years older, this is quite a different story of hardcore unplugged lessons, which are more like a soap opera than a course.
We do whatever comes up, from creating stories to composing music in GarageBand, we turn the sofa cover into an ocean simulator, we search the internet for stuff. Most recently we are in the longish process of making a paper haunted house.
She has a blog where I store the products we create and all kinds of videos and links that have anything to do with our lessons, her mum is very conscious about using it regularly, so I'm proud to say she DOES make remarkable progress.
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| The abandoned house next door |
She is 6 now and she looooves spooky things! It was around Halloween last year that I showed her a game on the British Council Kids website. God knows how, she remembered the word 'haunted house'.
Part of the story is the house next to ours, which has been abandoned for over ten years now. It was built about a century ago, so it makes a great Halloween decoration, most of my students are pretty excited about it, it has triggered many many projects and conversations.
Last Halloween we were looking at the usual scary Halloween stuff when I pointed to the house and said "it's a haunted house!"
Then it began, soon we found ourselves making a haunted house of paper and whatever we have, dead spiders and Christmas candy wrap included.
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| Motörhead, hell.... |
However, this is not what I want to write about, it's the Internet.
When we do some craft and spend some minutes in silence, I feel a bit guilty of not constantly pouring comprehensible input on her, so I usually try to find a kids' song that matches our activity on YouTube (from scratch), this little girl doesn't always like kids' songs (neither do I) and considers them babyish (so do I) and then she asks me "Barbi, do you have... on your tablet?" The "... " is always very surprising, my student's dad likes rock and heavy metal music, he listens to it on his phone and in the car. Well, this is why we ended up with listening to a Motörhead album on YouTube while covering the roof of the house with old leaves the other day...
Also, when she has a suggestion of what to put in the house, I often google it, trying to find the origami version of anything (we always have paper at home) or other craft solution, and we solve a lot of problems in this way. Now she has the habit of telling me what to type in my tablet or laptop, to find this or that. She doesn't really know how the internet works and she can't write, but she knows that it is something that helps us a lot.
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| Spiral stairs |
Last week I wanted to make egg carton bird masks, but our rocker girl opted for using the egg carton to add a tower to the house. Cool! Initiatives are always welcome! So we made the tower and then she said we'd need a flight of spiral stairs and she imagined what it would have been like to walk on the stairs in the darkness and spiders everywhere and.... And then she stopped.... , as she tried to plan how we will solve this..., then looked at me and then the tablet, and I knew what she wanted. I said yes, I'd type 'origami spiral stairs' in my tablet. Of course we didn't get a specific origami staircase, but after looking through some pages I knew how we would do it, prepared the paper and handed it over to her to finish. She was thrilled! Then she paused and looked at me again, that slow moment...
And then she asked me: "Can you do anything? Anything you want?"
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You know, I said yes. That moment I felt I could do anything.
If there is a want, if we can work together, if we are connected to the internet (= the whole world), we can find the origami version of anything, not only that, we just imagine the things that can go in that little house and we can make it real.
How does she imagine these things? My tablet and my computer may seem to be magic machines, I can type things in them and I can conjure her daddy's favorite songs, I can find the solution to our construction problems, I can find songs and games about any animal.
Can you feel what I felt there?
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Come at me Santa! We are naughty and nice!
