Teacher for a Day

On Friday, I went with Sally to a school to teach English for the day. Sally is staying at Maggie's house also and she is part of a international volunteer program called United Planet. She'd been going to the school for a week and asked me if I wanted to come for the day. It ended up being such a great day! We went to about 6 different classrooms and I introduced myself as Miss Rose. The kids in the different classrooms ranged from 2nd to 8th grade. Each class was very intrigued when they saw Sally and I walk in. They were just as intrigued by me as I was by them I guess.

The kids have English lessons for about 5 hours per week so our job was to be there for the 20-30 minutes that each class was learning English. It is priceless to the students to have a native English speaker there and I found it equally helpful for my Spanish practice because I found myself speaking a lot of Spanish with the children who came up to ask me questions or give me presents. :) Each class was a totally different experience too. In one class, they had a book with actual exercises (the exercise that day discussed the difference between 'was' and 'were') Sally, the Chilean teacher and I went around helping the students with the exercises. In other classes where the children were much younger, Sally ended up reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears in English and/or singing Old MacDonald. The kids loved that and I found it entertaining too!

Another exercise that we did was to have the kids ask me questions in English. This was very memorable because the kids asked me questions like what my favorite color, sport, country, and animal was. I would then answer back speaking very controlled because the entire classroom was watching me and English is not their first language. This experience put a lot of things in perspective for me. Those kids found it very difficult to even say one sentence in English such as one where they had to put in was/were. And if an outsider were watching this, they wouldn't truly understand why that kid is scared to speak English. But as a 21 year old adult who is attempting to gain fluidity in the Spanish language, I completely understand those kids. It is HARD! It is an unexplainable phenomenon really...there are times when you can speak it, and there are times when you can't say something to save your life. Anyways, I enjoyed the kids questions about whether or not I liked Michael Jackson or whether I had a Facebook or my favorite: Someone asked me if I had many Chilean friends. I confessed that I had only just begun classes so I didn't have many Chilean friends. I then asked if anyone had older brothers or sisters and 30 hands shot-up amidst eager shouts. haha

Also, many of the kids asked me if I knew Spanish and I said I was learning it but it is a process. They then urged me to say something in Spanish and I agreed to the challenge. :) I said a little bit about myself in Spanish and who knows whether it was good or not...but the cute thing is that the class started applauding afterward and giving me some "ooooh"s and "ahhh"s of approval. All in all, the day was great and I plan on going back this Friday. Sally and I want to bring along a song to sing with the kids in English but we are going to have to figure out how to get the kids the words so that they can sing along. The number of opportunities I have been offered during this study abroad experience make my head spin. The sky is the limit.