Catalina - TP #3

Second time around was so much better. First of all I think they are getting more used to the idea of having a class, and secondly I think they also feel more comfortable around me. The class started a little later and the three year old actually sat through the entire class with her mom without interrupting. She got really into in when we ended the class singing the alphabet song. She´s going to be my new token student.

My activities were better organized and a lot more structured. I didn´t want to be taken by surprise if they decided not to collaborate, but wanted to be able to present activities where they could be active if I managed that to happen. We started with their vocabulary log and it went really well. It took up more time than I was planning, but this is stuff that interests them and is catching their attention on a day to day basis, so I was willing to put in that extra space for these answers. I am also introducing some translation here, but always after my dorky acting out of what stuff is, and only if they are still gaping at me as if I where some sort of alien. Alberto had gone through his phone and asked me all about missed calls, outgoing , incoming and so forth. Tony had a little bit of everything including ‘I like my food spicy’ and Emma ended up with a question about ‘bon voyage’ – where I had to explain that English also likes to introduce foreign expressions to sound cooler.

Then we went to lesson two and I need to add some extra info here: having a book really helps. It can give you a large amount of ideas that you can change as best needed. And having visited a CIES class that is more or less at a similar level as my current students also gave me really go input on how things are done in general. I had all sorts of games with the body parts, starting with a drawing of a body on the board (definitely not as cool as Antony´s ones...) where they had to fill in the names of the different parts. This gave me a great idea of their spelling and let´s just say it's… um… lacking. Inexistent may even be a better adjective. They don´t really know how to spell in Spanish either. So it´s good! They are never going to catch my spelling errors! And it means that I am going to focus on speaking production since I think they´ll be able to apply it faster, and keep writting a slow but continuous goal.

We then went to asking questions about what actions one can do with different body parts and that went very well. Controlled but well. Much better that a game we´d tried the previous day in which I had discovered they didn´t know who Will Smith, Angelina Jolie or David Beckham are! So much for pop culture! I am very impressed on how Tony reacts to having to speak. He is the person that´s in control of the group, the one that organized the class, the coordinator of his construction company, the smooth (Spanish) talker of the three. Yet when he has to speak in English he gets very flustered and stumped. He just looks at the word and gets scared. He thinks English is the enemy. He tries to make up in his head how it should sound before saying it and it takes him very long to actually say anything out loud since he thinks he´s going to fail at it. It´s amazing to understand how much effort it’s taking him to actually work out the will power to speak in English. I just hope I can help him out in actually making it happen!

We ended up spelling out some stuff they had questions about and that´s when I realized their spelling wasn´t great. So it´s alphabet time and little Tatiana helped me out to not feel excessively dumb singing the alphabet song! Their homework for this week is to know it by heart for Thursday and I hope they create an army of alphabet singing Salvadoreños in their work area. I am planning on uniting all these activities with a role playing game of a doctor visit or doctor phone call – so they can introduce their new body vocabulary and then go for dressing that naked person with all these interestingly called clothes items.