The second school visit

January 13th: Another early start, we arrived Scoula Santa Caterina at 8:30 and did some photocopying. The first lesson we conducted a survey to find out all about the students' interests. In the second class we sand the song "Give me a home among the gum trees" and taught the students the song. We focused on listening skills and vocabulary. The students were also very interested in the Tasmanian Devil and were intrigued by the information on the poster with the four embryos fitting on the five cent coin. We gave all the students a five cent coin. They all also chose some thing from our combined store of goodies. After the first two lessons we had a break. The staff had organised a wonderful morning tea for us. Again we sampled some sweet wine in which we dipped our biscotti(biscuits). We ere also each given a school badge and a gift which consisted of a small bottle of Vino Santo and biscotti di Prato.

The principal, Nadino, then drove us to la scuola elementare (the primary school) in his Volvo where we were introduced to the English teacher Linda Middleton and also the grade 5 teacher Ilaria Maccelli. We have arranged to do a penpals program and gave Ilaria a lot of resources including posters, books and pamphlets which focus on Australian culture. Nadino and his wife Laura have invited Domenica, Adriana and I to dinner at their place on Monday night. He will collect us from Monash at 6:30. We had lunch as usual and then returned to Monash where we worked on the conditional tense and made up small dialogues. Following the short break we looked at gli acrostici, i tautogrammi, catene di parole and anagrame. Now off the the cinema to watch a movie. Adriana is waiting for me to come and buy brown paper and get pictures of river rats!