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Published: March 9th 2009
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I'm working with the second graders now instead of first. A little more challenging, and I actually have to have more stuff planned because I can't just take them outside to play a game to fill up time. They actually have to study. I do try to include fun stuff too though. This week was my first week. Lucila only gave me reading (syllables) and math to teach. For the whole week. No science or social studies or anything. Maya (who's teaching the first graders) and I decided we would put our kids together and add in our own sciences: one morning of natural science and one of social science a week. Wednesday we talked about families and communities and made family flowers with the names of the kids' parents, grandparents, and siblings on the petals and then their name in the middle. So now we have a very cute garden on our classroom wall! It was pretty hard to get them all to listen while we were trying to talk about families and communities, but the art part went really well! Thursday we went to the zoo. We chose some animals, found pictures, and put them up around the outside
of the 2 classrooms and bathrooms. Then we split them in half, each took a group, and learned about animals. For each one we talked about where they live, what they eat, size, colors, sounds, and how they move, imitating them of course. It actually worked really well! Then we let the kids each color one of the animals.
In Ecuador, and I think in most of Latin America, kids learn to read by syllables. They don't learn the alphabet, I don't think any of my kids could recite it to you if you asked them. They have syllables (ma me mi mo mu, sa se si so su, etc. with m, p, s, l, n) with the vowels, just changing the first consonant. They're taught to recognize the syllables and the sounds they make and then for each syllable they're given some words that they associate with the sounds and learn to read and write. It's kind of a weird way to do it. I guess it works because the older kids can read and write. Right now we're just finishing la le li lo lu and starting with n. We do a lot of practicing writing, matching words to pictures, word searches, finding the syllables in books or newspapers, cutting up the words into syllables and then the rest of the word and then putting them back together and gluing them on paper... So if anyone has any genius ideas, let me know!
For math we're doing sums. Basic ones, adding up to 10 so they can still count on their fingers. It's also still a lot about number recognition. Some of the kids can't recognize certain numbers unless we write out a number line and they count up to it. We're also doing greater than and less than up to 15, mostly working with the signs (the hungry crocodile that wants to eat the bigger number).
Thursday and Friday the teachers were gone again. Thursday we just did normal classes. Friday we did classes for an hour and then put them all together for an art project and PE. A lot of the grades had been doing stuff with body parts so we made people! Each person had either a head, torso, or legs that they drew and decorated. Then we put them all together into people and talked about how everyone's different but still equal and important. There are mostly indigenous kids at our school, but also some mestizos and they sometimes get picked on by the indigenous ones. So we made sure we emphasized the fact that even though we all look different we're all equal and we need to be nice to everyone. Hopefully it will help a little...maybe...
In the afternoon we did PE. Basically just a bunch of different games. We tried team stuff first, but they're all extremely competitive which ends up meaning a lot of cheating and yelling. At one point right when we were switching games and explaining a new one all the older boys just started dog piling on top of each other. We decided we would just play with the ones who would actually listen. I went over to the older kids and said ¨seriously, are you really doing this right now?¨ not yelling, just talking kinda quietly and I think they realized we were all really disappointed in them because for the next game they were as a group the best behaved I've ever seen them! The game we were playing was where everyone has a partner and we said 2 body parts and they had to touch them together. Usually you play that the slowest partners get out, but we were fed up with their competitiveness so we just played it without that part and it still worked well! All the younger kids enjoyed it, and we put in enough random combinations of parts to keep the older ones entertained. We ended with sharks and minnows, which basically just meant sprinting for half an hour constantly. We split them up into 2 groups by age so the little ones wouldn't get trampled. I was with the older ones and of course they all wanted to catch the teachers and a lot of them can run surprisingly fast! It was a lot of fun, but we were all exhausted by the end of the day!
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