First week

This first week of teaching has been fun, but a little rough. My host family showed me the outside of the school I teach at on the night I arrived, but not the classroom, and I had very little knowledge of what my first day would be like until I got there. Thankfully, the school had divided up my students by age already, and that division seems to be working out alright. I teach two younger classes for an hour each, and one older class for an hour and fifteen minutes.

That first day, everyone was all together, and I was assigned to teach only for an hour. I had not planned for such a big class, so I did a lot of improvising- we sang lots of songs, labeled the room with post-its, played some hangman, and did tongue twisters. For the rest of the week, it was animals for the younger class, and slang for the older class.

For the older class, on the second day, I asked them to work in pairs and write down any English word they could think of (like Jackie suggested). This is a GREAT WAY to find out what vocabulary they already know and what they still need to learn. I focused on slang because it was something new, and they love the flyswatter game and mad libs (which also taught them parts of speech). Some of them are almost fluent, which is impressive (and also a challenge).

The younger children have been difficult. In the future, it would be great if volunteers were taught how to give some simple classroom instructions, like ‘be quiet’, ‘sit down’, ‘raise your hand’, etc, before going off to teach, because the little ones were loud and didn’t understand what I wanted them to do. The first few days, I gave them worksheets I made to work on learning animal names and sounds, but active songs and games seem to work a lot better, especially for the younger, restless ones (who I’m not sure are able to read..)

I’m having a bit of trouble connecting with my host family. I have a host mother and two younger sisters, and my sisters speak very little English. They spend most of the day on the computer, reading, or watching TV, and I want to go out and do something with them, but we’re far out of Tarnow, the family does not own a car, and they don’t seem too interested in going outside. Today, I went to church with my family, but they’re over at their grandmother’s house and I was not invited.. so I’ve been around the house planning lessons. It’s a little isolating. If anyone else is having similar troubles, let me know! I want to bridge this gap before I leave.

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