Chiquita Banana!

I am about to head home after a good, long day at school. I've been sick for the past 5 days, and today's my first day back. It was nice to laze around the apartment with Booster, read some good books, and eat my fair share of homemade apple crumble. But, it's back to business now. And two day work weeks are mighty fine by me!

I wanted to blog about my class that just got out an hour ago. It's a group of ten little 9 yr olds at a satellite school about 30 minutes outside of Katowice. They are the jewels of my Thursday! Each one is bursting with personality and enthusiasm. Some have no social awareness, and others I'm convinced are old sages. They can be so serious and focused one minute, poring over every detail of their work, and the next they'll be slung over their chairs backwards with their tongues hanging down their chins tapping their heels together and clicking their pens. It's great!

So at the end of my lesson we played pictionary with new vocab they'd learned today. There were two teams, pretty much evenly split. The first of each team had a marker (with which to draw on the white board), and the other team members would guess what are the drawing. First team to guess gets the point. Okay, you also get the point. I always ask them: what's your team name. It's more fun than Team A and Team B, and they come up with all kinds of wonderful names: Dog (not dogs), Gorilla, Mouse, Skittles. This week, my star student Mieszko (pron: Mee-ish-ko) wanted Chiquita Banana! Soon after, the whole class is muttering: Chiquita Banana, Chiquita Banana. I couldn't help but giggle. It was Chiquita Banana versus Skittles for the pictionary championship.

We played pictionary for about 5 or 10 minutes (Chiquita Banana won), when I had a revelation. Why not teach them the famous Chiquita Banana song that I sang for hours on end as a child? We had 5 minutes left in class, and that was plenty of time to teach them the lyrics and movements. So we all stood in a circle, they repeated after me:

Chiquita Banana.
Chiquita Banana.
You peel it to the left,
You peel it to the right,
You open up the center and--
UMPH!--You take a bite!

At the "UMPH!" we all jumped up and landed with a big thud (opting for a less grotesque body movement of the original). Needless to say, they ate it up! Pun intended. We did the song and movements 5 times until it was time to go. They were all singing it on the way out the door. Now that's an English lesson! Haha, more like an American lesson.