The past few weeks have been really great, there have been trips, drinks, Christmas Shopping and plenty more reasons to despise living in France, but I'll get to that in good time.

My lessons have been going pretty well. I'm beginning to get some favourites in some of my classes. I know it's bad, but it's difficult not to like the kids who always listen and answer the questions correctly. I particularly love my class of CM1s (the second oldest in primary schools), normally me and the teacher take half the class each and work on the same topic then switch on the second class. We've successfully done numbers, colours, pets, days of the week, months and after this next week they'll have an excellent Christmas vocabulary. It's very easy to see the difference between good teachers and bad teachers, it is really reflected in the students. Madame Lagache's CM1s work so well, they don't fool around and always listen but are still lots of fun at the same time. I think they are probably scared of her. I don't really blame them, as me and Gisela the Spanish assistant are also pretty terrified of her. But in my other school there are some terrible classes, they are so difficult to teach and really don't want to learn, and you can tell that this is because the teachers are much softer with them.

I'm really excited about Christmas now. It's feels like this year is going to be really good, not only because I have the money to get my family decent presents this year but also because I feel like it's more of a big deal going home because I'm coming from France. Lille is so Christmassy, there is a massive wheel on the Grand Place and there is a cute little Christmas Market. This week I'm going to carry on teaching the kids Christmas vocab, including reindeer which will be taught through pin the nose on Rudolph.

Obviously I wrote this quite a long time, and rather than bombard everyone with posts about events I can't really remember I'll reflect on the past few weeks and write a new post in the next few days.

A bientot