As mentioned in the previous blog post, the Part 2 will be focused on present, this week. This week we have holidays. But from my perspective it was the busiest week this autumn. My Demola project took me about 20 hours, at home we got a visitor from Dubai and had to dedicate some of my free time to being a tourist guide, and I am also participating in a Mentoring program, organized by Unipoli Tampere, which again took some time. It is also worth mentioning that this time of the year is the season when flu is thriving. Yuliya unfortunately became the victim, which is the reason why we only had 1 lesson this week. Because of the autumn break, the most obvious choice for a meeting place was TAMK. Usually we have some troubles finding the empty classroom, but on Monday the building felt like a ghost town; the only thing disturbing the eerie silence was an occasionally blinking fluorescent light.
On the Russian learning side I have used the prepared template with pictures to express:
a) Where did I work before (Spain, Switzerland, Slovenia, Finland) and what did I do
b) What am I doing now; it included repeating the numbers
c) When and where I was born
d) Greeetings, daily situations regarding interactions: Hi, How are you?, Goodbye
I still had so much energy left, so I have asked Yuliya to engage in a conversation with me. This was an excellent opportunity to repeat what I know and also to learn a word or ten more, because only the speaking situations really prepare you for all kinds of situations that might occurr.
On the Finnish teaching side we had only one item on the agenda. On lesson 6 I gave Yuliya a huge amount of homework. I have written 27 statements in Past Simple Tense. Her task was to change all statements to negative form. Additionally I gave her a paragraph about my daily activities. She had to convert it to Past Tense.
She came very prepared and wanted to read her homework, but I completely crashed her plan. Let me show you how.
| The statement was: | Her task was to convert it to negative form |
| Luin tämän kirjan. | En lukenut tätä kirjaa. |
I have given her a task to convert the past affirmative sentence to present form, make a negative present form, and only then read the homework part.
It was didactically a very good task, because usually the students learn how to make a past form by adding a letter “i” somewhere in the verb. But nobody usually teaches how to convert the past to present form. It proved to be quite a challenge. But this was one of the last grammatical exercises in this course.
This is also an introduction to the last part of this series of three blogs. The last part will deal with the future. I will try to express my wishes what I want to learn from Yuliya, and Yuliya can do the same from her perspective. The blog post will also help us planning the lessons.
Sincerely yours (С уважением),
Sebastjan (Себастьян)
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