Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Today we went to a local school and taught classes all morning. I got assigned to the sixth grade, so the kids were nine and ten mostly and very cute. At first I was disappointed not to have a younger grade, but with older kids the interaction is more interesting. We planned out three hours of class time. First we taught English. I made a worksheet with English action verbs and their Spanish counterparts, and I had them split into groups of five and play charades with the verbs; they had to guess the verb in English. One group especially was really good and into it.

Then we mixed geography and English, and taught a lot of geographical feature terms that they will never remember but one of my group members thought was important – words like coral reef and archipelago and mesa and a couple I didn’t even know in English. But it was fun since we had them play Pictionary on the board with the words, and, again, had them guess in English. For more geography without the English, we split them into groups and assigned them a country to learn about from these cards we made up. The group I was helping had Germany and I told them Germany had lots of fancy castles were princesses used to live. We were drawing what we thought the country looked like according to what we learned, so I drew a princess and then I had to draw it for five other girls since they liked it. We were going to have them present after but they were getting rowdy so we didn’t.

After that was break, when they get served some food, usually rice and beans (provided by government funding and padded with 25 cents from each student a week – some can’t pay).

After break we had them write stories with the prompt that they are traveling to any country in the world by plane and they crash somewhere, like in the jungle or the desert or a city. One girl wrote this really cute story about how her mother told her she had to go to Paraguay and she was very sad, but she took a plane there and crashed in Argentina. She saw some different animals and came to a city, and she saw a tall, thin woman there. It’s her mom and her mom tells her she never has to leave again. A couple of the other kids didn’t write anything at all. I think they all had very different literacy levels, and also they don’t seem to have very many creative projects.

After the classes we talked with the teachers, and they told us about problems with funding and parents who won’t or can’t reinforce what’s taught at school. Also, parents who can’t afford to feed them breakfast so they come in hungry and parents who abuse their kids. Mostly we just talked about how it was a good experience.

Later I played with Camila for a long time. We started with bubbles (from Ellie, the best present) and then played hospital (which involved many dramatic death falls) and then I tied her shoes together and chased her around.