Was that Kindergarten or First Grade?

It is amazing how many memories come flooding though my head from the years I spent substitute teaching in Hot Springs. While my favorite classes were not the kindergarten, first or second grades I always found that I enjoyed it more that I thought I would when it was all over. I think in the lead up I would always be more nervous about a day in k-2 than in any other class in school (perhaps except for high school p-e).
A fun thing we did almost first thing every day in the K-1 classes was the word wall. Each morning the class would review their vocabulary words together by having the leader of the day or the teacher point to the words and the whole class would say them out loud. Throughout the year as they ran across new words those would be added to the wall and hopefully their vocabulary would be stretched. They always included the most simple of words: the, and, of, a, on, at, like, will, want, if, any, about, I, me, she, it, he, we, they, wish, nice, is, was etc. So it was with a bit of irony and a few chuckles that we started putting together our own word wall yesterday. Words like: mas, mais, a, o, as, os, uns, umas, um, uma, ao, Eu, ele, elas, sempre, ainde, antes, depois, por, para, em, de, e, and many more. Our list includes verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verb conjugations, irregular verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, numbers, months, seasons, days of the week, etc. Our goal is take the entire wall and cover it with every Portuguese word that we know or have encountered in our lessons. Over kill? Maybe but if we can train our minds to see a word and then remember it, we can save some time, when we have to figure out what it means the next time we run across it. (Besides, the portuguese/english dictionaries we bought are a little more than frustrating.) So, those of you teachers who find yourself reading this post, especially if you teach the younger ages, smile because you know what I'm talking about, laugh because of the irony of it all, and then pray for us as we learn how to live life in a grown-up body and less than kindergarten education. Excitement never ceases.

On that note: language study is progressing well. I had a "great" conversation at church Sunday night. It was unique in that it did not involve someone who could speak English and that it lasted for 15 minutes, much longer than the typical two or three sentences they usually last (with significant portion of that time being a search for a vocabulary word here and there). Baby steps but encouraging nonetheless.