1. Researching and writing the next installment in my series for Multilingual Living, "Learning French In and Around the Maison," which, as it focuses on music, sent me scrambling to Griffin's CD collection, YouTube, and the vast expanses of the Internet to find songs about homes and houses. I discovered a surprising number of children's songs and nursery rhymes about appalling situations in one's home: bugs, rodents, fire, famine, and willful destruction of property. Stay tuned--the article should be published on Tuesday, barring any natural disasters.
2. Emptying out our 900-square-foot basement so that our contractor and his workers can transform one large, cold, concrete room used previously only for storage and ping-pong into a space that will--in December!--house a guest room, my home office, a bathroom, and a space that I can use for French classes for kids one day.And if we can figure out the logistics, we'll have bookcases that slide to the side between my office and the playroom area, which will really open it up for those French classes (and make it very easy to, say, grab my stuffed Eiffel Tower and books and French games from my office when I want to show them to the kiddos).
3. Planning a three-hour workshop about Reading Buddies to present at the Colorado Association of Libraries conference. I called it "The Complete Works of Reading Buddies, Abridged: How to Create (or Expand!) a Reading Buddies Program at Your Library or School," and my goal was to give the attendees lots of ideas plus the materials they would need to start up their own program.
This involved a suitcase full of props, a briefcase full of handouts, my very first PowerPoint presentation created all by myself (I've been very resistant to that program so far), and five teen Reading Buddy volunteers for the panel discussion. Whew. After getting all that ready, I was pooped.
(Curious? You can access some of my handouts and materials online.)What was really exciting about the CAL Conference, though, turned out to be meeting the keynote speaker afterwards: Dr. Stephen Krashen, a language-teaching researcher whose work I studied throughout grad school! I'll write about what exactly he was doing at a librarians' conference, what we talked about, and what he called me in my next post.
Oh, all right. I won't leave you hanging on the edge of your seat (who knows when I'll make time to write here again): he called me "kid." Kid! This language guru called me "kid"! And me 36 years old this year. Sheesh!
Oh, and we've been potty-training Griffin, which means I spend a lot of time washing his Elmo underpants out in the bathroom sink!
ReplyDelete"What was really exciting about the CAL Conference, though, turned out to be meeting the keynote speaker afterwards: Dr. Stephen Krashen, a language-teaching researcher whose work I studied throughout grad school!"
ReplyDeleteCoooooool!!! You know you're a language geek when you get all excited and jiggly inside reading something like this! ;-)
I'm looking forward to reading about what all went down.
Good luck with the basement prep for remodeling, and especially with the potty training. Oh those potty training days are not easy, are they. But just think: eventually he is going to *get* it and it will all be a distant memory very, very soon.
Bon courage!
Yay language geeks! Yay word nerds!
ReplyDeleteRight now the potty training is less yay and more, "Wow, I'm glad I was too tired to change the sheets on my bed last night." Snuggling in bed while reading to my son isn't as fun as it used to be!
Thanks for the encouragement, Karin. (And sorry for using the wrong vowel in your name in my comment yesterday--I usually try to pay better attention to that sort of thing!)