Day 11: June 1st

Today Melanie and I taught two lessons for our third graders. I was so super excited to get to teach lesson, but just a little apprehensive on how the language barrier would pan out. The first lesson was “She is a…” with four professions following: doctor, student, secretary, and writer. To start the lesson, Melanie and I wanted to act out the profession so students could get a visual of what the profession actually was. I acted out a student and doctor. It was so much fun because I came into the classroom and sat at a desk and pretended to be one of the students yelling “Yo, Yo, Yo!” “Me, Me, Me!” The kids definitely got a kick out of it. Next I was a doctor. I had a stethoscope that I borrowed from the family. I put on the gear and started walking around the room and picked out one kid. I felt his head, and then checked his heartbeat. The kids were laughing hysterically. It was a lot of fun. We did a lot of repetition with the words to make sure that the students knew what they were saying and how to pronounce it.

One thing that I noticed was the kids were having trouble pronouncing ‘student.’ In Spanish, student is estudiante. The kids were pronouncing student, ‘estundent.’ In Spanish an ‘e’ comes before an ‘s’ word so the kids were having a hard time pronouncing that. After lots of modeling how to pronounce the word with my mouth and having the kids repeat it went pretty well. We also played a game where kids held up notecards for the appropriate profession that matched a picture I had drawn. The kids did really well with the tactile, hands-on approach. Finally, after writing and drawing the sentences in their English notebooks, the ESL teacher, Byanca, wanted us to give the students a worksheet as a form of assessment. The students did fairly well with thirteen of the twenty-one scoring 100%. I thought this was pretty good considering this was the first time they were introduced to the material.

After our lesson, Dr. Herrera suggested that we try something different. She suggested the strategy “Quiz-Quiz-Trade.” It seemed kind of confusing and I was worried if the students would understand, but Melanie and I had prepared and changed our lesson in order to incorporate this into the next lesson. The second lesson, “He is a…” started off well with boys coming to the front and acting out different professions. We again did lots of repetition and used lots of visuals. Halfway through the lesson, Dr. Herrera stepped in and took over the lesson. We had talked about doing a game called “Quiz-Quiz-Trade” with the kids. We were getting ready to do a review with the kids when Dr. Herrera decided to model it for us. She ended up teaching the last twenty minutes of the period. We got the kids organized to play the game, but we had to play inside the room because the older kids had recess outside. Some of the kids understood the directions, but it was still pretty hectic. With five minutes left, Herrera left and we had to finish the mess that had been started. We played two more rounds and then finished by giving the kids worksheets that the ESL teacher wanted them to have. I thought for the most part of lesson went well, but it did get really confusing and I was really disappointed that Melanie and myself did not get the opportunity to teach our entire lesson as we had planned.
After we were done with school we went to see a topographic map of Guatemala. There were lots of mountains, and volcanoes that were proportional to all the actual mountains and volcanoes in Guatemala. Dorita pointed out a lot of different places within the country. We learned where Dorita worked, where the recent earthquake was, and various other places we had visited. It was very interesting and I am really glad to see one of the main sights of Guatemala.

As the park was closing one of the guards escorted us out of the park. He actually ended up taking us to an amusement park that was closing. There was a huge slide that we were allowed to slide down. No one was in the park and the guards gave us special permission. We were able to slide down on old potato sacks. One of the employees’s sprayed extra gasoline on the slide before we slid down to make us go extra fast. We were able to go down twice for the price of one! It was such a blast. Afterwards I was going to get up on a step to take a picture, and I tripped over the step. It was honestly bringing me back to the days of being a kid: going down a huge slide, tripping in front of everyone, and getting laughed at. It was so much fun though! I loved all of it. After the slide and the trippage, the guard took us on a tour of the park. It was an old park and it was really interesting to be able to get a personal tour of the park. As we finished the afternoon, we walked back to our car. There was a man that had been sitting there for awhile. Apparently he was ‘watching’ the cars and we were told that if you don’t pay those people than they will do something bad to you. It was just an interesting situation and I had never been in a situation like that. Of course it was nothing bad, just interesting.

The car ride home was long car ride home. We found out that someone committed suicide on the bridge that we always use. We took a much longer tour of the city. It was really neat to see different parts of the city that we had not seen before. Much of the city that we saw was considered the old historic part of Guatemala. We even heard a story from Dorita about a women that got a ride from a taxi driver right outside a graveyard. The taxi driver dropped her off and said he would come back in the morning to pick up the money she owed him. He came back the next day and the people that lived in the house said that that lady had passed away two years ago. Oooooo…creepy. We passed the graveyard that apparently the lady was picked up at. It was a huge public graveyard. Dorita told Melanie, Carina and I that people had to pay to keep their loved ones there. If the fees were not paid than the bodies would be taken out of the grave and put in a mass hole.

For dinner that evening we had a great meal as always. I had some good conversations with the family that evening as well. I talked to Luis about learning different languages and he suggested that I listen to romantic Spanish music in order to better learn the language. Luis also suggested that I watch Spanish television. I am definitely going to take those suggestions into consideration as I try and learn the language a bit better.