Our first class of the day ended up being for the 4-8 year old age group, however on Monday, our supervisor brought in 10-12 preteen/teenage boys who had their soccer practice cancelled or something, so I changed the lesson mid-stream and geared the lesson towards them since they were now the majority. I think what happened was that our supervisor felt bad that we didn't have many children in class and he saw these boys who didn't have anything to do, so he told them to come to music class. I did everything I could think of to engage both sets of kids at the same time, which included a singing dodgeball game from Afganistan, Native American stick games, and lots of percussion playing and improvising. The rest of the week this class was more consistant, with a half dozen or so 4-8 year olds.
Most of our music classes are made up mostly of girls. I think one reason this happened was because of a slight "mis-marketing" of our classes. It's kind of hard to market "Orff style" music classes, especially when general music classes don't really exist. I told them that we teach music using folk dance, creative movement, percussion, singing, singing games, body percussion, improvising and composing. This got condensed to "dance class." The other thing is that the police summer program is mostly sports segregated by gender, so some of our classes are scheduled so that a group of girls come straight from volleyball.
Our second class was made up of 10-14 year old girls. On day 2, there were about ten 12-14 year old volleyball girls that were told up to my 4-8 year old music class. I decided that I didn't want to do that again, so we told them to come back a bit later for their age group. That class went very well, and we had about 15 girls and a big focus of the class was on playing the recorder. However, most of them didn't come back. Each day after that we had less and less girls. By Friday we were down to 2 girls.
Our third class of the day, which started at 4:15 and allowed us a nice big lunch and siesta break in the middle of the day, was our most consistant this week. For most of the week we had 25 girls 7-10 years old who came directly from volleyball. This group went pretty well, especially when we broke the class up into 2 or 3 groups for our singing games, folk dances and percussion playing. When we're in 3 groups, each of the Dutchersmith females leads a group, and I facilitate the whole class. This works really well.
Our 4th and final class of the day was English class. This wasn't in our original plans, but we did it because it seemd to be in high demand. (They don't even know that I am a certified and trained ENL teacher in the states.) Everyday it was made up of different kids. Wednesday we had 15 children between the ages of 6-10. Earlier in the week we had kids as old as 14. Of the 15 students there on Wednesday, only 3 had been there on Tuesday.
The biggest challenge of teaching English class is that I think students here are used to a totally different way of learning which is more "old school," using things such as rote memorization, work sheets and copying things from the board. I try to use more engaging things like singing, chanting, games and TPR (Total Physical Response). TPR involves responding to commands. It also involves more concentration and thinking than more traditional methods so the students are kind of uncomfortable and sometimes reluctant to participate. Luisa and Magdalena, who were the ones initially very excited about teaching English, were pretty down after Thursday's class because the kids were very distracted. and had a hard time concentrating and paying attention. So, we went out for supper, talked about it and came up with a new plan for Friday that involves all of us and engages more students more intimately.
So, on Friday, that's what we did. After singing and chanting time at the beginning, Luisa split the whole class into 4 groups based on age and ability. Each of us took a group and did a 10 minute center. After 10 minutes, we rotated groups until all 4 groups went to each teacher-led center. It worked wonderfully and engaged all the students all of the time! Yay!!! Our four groups on Friday were:
1. Word matching game with family vocab--Luisa
2. Playing a game with alphabet picture cards-Magdalena
3. TPR using family vocab--Teresa
4. Family vocab practice using Family pictures--Kent
Luisa and I went shopping for some teaching materials on Thursday and found blank cards (for making flash cards), English alphabet cards, English-Spanish fruit and vegetable cards, food cards, and a little basic English book that we can make copies of different pages. The total cost of all of that was 17 soles, which comes to about $6.50. The police station is willing to make copies for us. Next week we are adjusting our schedule, which will hopefully fix a few of our attendance/scheduling issues. Our first 2 classes need more students, so we are adjusting the schedule in hopes of attracting more.
A good chunk of today I will spend doing lesson plans. Actually, "lesson plans" isn't a very good word for planning in this environment. A list of "lesson possibilities" is a more acurate description of my planning.
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