Austin CO2

Class number 2: Vicky Ledbetter taught a reading class, foundations level. Vicky made me feel welcome, as did Karin Devick. She had me actively participate in the activity, which was describing our apartments here in Tallahassee. She introduced new vocabulary to the class; mostly furniture and names of different parts of the house: example, couch, coffee table, kitchen, bedroom, etc. They seemed to pick it up quickly, since it was just memorizing words and putting them with images (picture dictionary at its best.)
The students had a little trouble with matching some nouns with adjectives. Vicky mentioned that in many languages, the noun comes before the adjective. For example, in spanish you would say "pelo verde", meaning green hair. The literal translation is hair green, so many of these students would say things like "I have a couch blue," or a "table coffee". Just switching those around is an easy fix enough.
Then we did something that had little to do with English, but was fun nonetheless. We each drew a picture of our apartments, something I can't say I'm very good at. The students were much better at it than I was.
There was an obvious disparity between the foundations students and level 1. A much bigger gap than I anticipated. The difference between level 2 and 3 or 3 to 4 were not very noticeable to me, but foundations to 1 was. I'm not sure why that was.