Accent: Adventures with Language 2016, Part II

2016 brought us down South, Alabama! At the end of the summer we moved to a little town south of Montgomery, Alabama. We found a beautiful old house in the Historic District of Prattville. I had so many reservations and fears about moving down here, the weather during the summer, the schools' ratings, the lack of a Dual Language Program, among other things.
Six months later, I have no desire to move back up North. However, I have experienced very many interesting things here due to my accent.
My first experience happened at my younger daughter's school when I was there as a sub. A second grade classroom, 17 kids, all Caucasian, (According to http://prattville.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm 98% of the population here is white) so, not very much diversity in the school.
so, I come in, say good morning, and the first thing I hear back from a little boy is: "Why are you speaking Spanish?, we don't know Spanish here!" Kudos to him for recognizing my accent, right?!
I smiled and continue with my sub routine. He continued with his remarks throughout the morning, I graciously ignored him, especially because it wasn't hurtful, it was more like, why do you speak like that? Can you speak English now, until after lunch, when I asked him to start working on his paper instead of goofing around and he said: "what did you say, I don't understand you, I don't speak Spanish." My Hispanic blood boiled (a little) and I said: (with my best Hispanic accent) "I know what you mean, I can't hardly understand what you are saying with your thick Southern Accent!" And I walked away. The other kids laugh and told him to shush for the rest of the day!
I subbed at the school almost everyday of the school year. I learned to love those little first and second graders with southern accent! And they learned to love my Hispanic accent as well, I manage to include some Spanish teaching at the end of each day and by the end of the year I had a lot of kiddos asking me to say something in Spanish again! I think they were thirsty for diversity. My daughter was also bombarded with questions about the Spanish language, even my oldest daughter, who was in a different school, was able to show her skills speaking Spanish sometimes. She felt so proud of it and her eyes beamed when she told me her experiences.
I think my biggest problem has been understanding others when they speak, specially if they speak too fast and have a very marked southern accent. I had to go back to my strategy of nodding and smiling. 😉 It has been an adventure for sure!

Flourless Peanut Butter Muffins

I love that my girls love to cook! Today FOOSE decided to make some flourless Peanut Butter muffins. It is such an easy recipe that this is her second day they have done it. While we were busy making her video, Button made her own cake, I don't even know where she got the recipe, but she promises to make it again with a video. It must have been easy because by the time we were done, she was ready to put her cake in the oven, and oh boy, it was delicious!.

Back to the muffins, they are delicious too, easy and good for snacking or lunch boxes!

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Here is the video, enjoy!

2016 Adventures Part I

2016 brought us great opportunities to travel and be surrounded with diversity and other languages. In the spring of 2016 we traveled to Europe. The first thing that struck me was that almost all the people we encounter could speak English, besides their native language. Which makes sense, since there are about 335,000,000 people who speaks English in the world!

We were in Vienna  for a day. We were a little lost and hungry, on a Sunday. Everything was closed, especially since it was 8 in the morning. We walked around the Ernst-Happen-Stadion. It was completely desolate. However we found this Hot Dog stand that was just opening and some construction workers getting to it. We approached it too. Everybody was speaking German, or a version of it. I ordered a bratwurst, the lady was smiling at me but she didn't understand a thing I was saying, until I said "Wurst", I think. The bratwurst was a baguette with a big sausage inside, cheese and ketchup. It was pretty good, we only needed one to feed the four of us and we learned how to say "thank you" in German: "danke"
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We took the bus to Prague, we had no problems there, the bus attendant gave instructions in both German and English. We finally met our friends in Prague. They took us to this beautiful little town in the country, Opatovice, where we met my friend's dad. He doesn't speak any English, so we started learning some new words in Czech, we used lots of mimic to be able to understand each other when my friend was not around. It was fun, and as usual, my daughters learned more words and used them more often than me. Some of the words I learned to use everyday are: dobrou noc (good night), dekuji (thank you), sbohem (goodbye), prosim (please), jack se mas (how are you) dobre ( fine).

Like anybody who speaks a different language than you, people here seemed to be very happy when we attempted to use their language, so we did our best. Young people, thought, could speak English as well. That is one thing I want my daughters to keep in their minds, that is wonderful to learn other languages, it is helpful and it is fun.
We visited Prague also, beautiful, dreamy city. We spent most of our time in Kutna Hora, where my friend is from. I had the opportunity to visit my friend's daughter classroom and I loved how beautifully organized the students were. It was a first grade classroom, they all changed their street shoes into sleepers as they come in school, so the floors were pretty cleaned. They had like 15 minutes of English, my girls got to be in the spotlight teaching the class some colors and the pronunciation. We also visited my friend's younger son school. It was a Montessori school and it was pretty interesting. I loved it. The kids played outside, even though is pretty cold, they ate together traditional food, pretty delicious too, and they cleaned after themselves. If they got too cold, there was one warm room they could go to, inside there were no chairs,  only lots of blankets and pillows, books, coloring papers, crayons, stuffed animals. It was a very relaxed room, there was one teacher in there reading aloud to some students.
   This is the school. The round room is the warm room.      The bathroom was outside.

It was a neat experience. All the teachers could speak English as well as Czech. I didn't want to ever leave that beautiful town. But we had to and I will tell you where we went on part II.