My name is Nina and I am in India since August last year. I can´t believe that now the half of my time in India is over. Time passes by so fast! I work in three different schools. In two primary schools and one high school located near to Kundapur.In all schools me and my project partner teach English. On November we started reading the Jungle Book together with my students for the 5th to 7th standard. It makes a lot of fun to discover the story together with the students. They are always happy when I enter the class with the book. We always sit in a circle on the floor; it is not the classic style of teaching. Every day the lesson starts with the repetition of the last chapter. By telling and reading the story they learn new vocabulary and you can see the progress in understanding and talking English. Also a part of my Jungle Book lessons is reading. The more they can read, the happier they are. Sometimes the students also act the story with lots of enthusiasm. As you can see lessons with the Jungle Book are always fun and I really enjoy them!
In the lessons without the Jungle Book I try to teach some new vocabulary by using songs, games and drawings. The 4th standard loves singing new English songs and so our daily routine is to start the lesson with three songs. To check if the students learned the new vocabulary I write some dictations with them. I can´t believe that they really like it. When I was a student I always hated dictations. They always scream: „Yeah! “

The work in the high school is definitely more challenging, because the classes consist of 60 students and it is hard to know, if they understand us. My project partner and me created a skill test to divide the classes into two groups after their level of English. Now one class consists of 30 students, but it is still hard to get the attention of the students. Our task is here also to teach English and to try to get them to speak in English with each other.We also try to teach some basic grammar. In the beginning it was a challenge to stick into the Indian school system, because it is totally different to the one in Germany. As I am used to it now, working in the schools really makes fun and I am looking forward to the next three months in my project.