Friday, December 10, 2010

how many thistles did king thistle stick in the thistle of his hand?


December 8, 2010
So this blog is going to be a bit of a potpourri of everything that has happened since, well Thanksgiving.
Last week there wasn’t any school for me. So nothing really happened until the weekend. I went to Tacloban to go shopping and spend the day with some volunteers. We had pizza at this really nice place then did some browsing around. Then that night I stayed with a volunteer’s host family in Baras. It was a nice change of scenery.
Sunday was UN International Volunteer Day and one the CYF volunteer’s sites had arranged a river clean up. I’m not really going to go into much detail about this one. In all my years of janitoring and living I have never done anything as gross as that. I’m very proud of the volunteers who were way more hardcore than I was. They will get extra rewards. I managed to find a way to help thought and it was a good experience. It was good to have the children helping and seeing that we don’t want all that garbage in the river.
After that we went back to Baras, got cleaned up, took a nap then hit the mall for Harry Potter.
We had a little bit more school this week, but not by much. Monday was a prep day for the English Month Culmination. I worked on my first lessons.
Tuesday was English Month Culmination. I had no idea what this was going to be like and thought it would be a spelling bee and some monologues and things like that because that is what had been practiced on Monday and the weeks before. It was, but other schools were there. It was a district competition and kind of really neat. In the morning they had academic competitions. This is when the spelling bees and writing compositions took place.
Then in the afternoon they had the non-academic competitions. A couple weeks ago my teacher asked me to coach her kids in a reader’s theatre. The example she gave me was bad, but we did some editing and made it work. Then my students worked it. They took first place.
You win some you lose some. The teachers had asked me a few weeks ago to be part of their tongue twister. I did having no idea what it was for. It was for the teacher tongue twister competition. So we’d been practicing for weeks and weeks, but no one told us we could do choreography (heck I didn’t even know what it was for). We took third place, out of three. Hahaha.
Wednesday I finally did some co teaching. For grade 5 we had a lesson on words that can be adjectives or adverbs. All these are things that as an English speaker I’m aware they exist but don’t really know about it really. Luckily the English teachers here are whizzes at grammar rules. The teaching style for them is very much rote memorization. So it was fun to add an activity or two a little different. My first activity I did was interactive and the kids did really good at it, but then for the next activity when they had to actually think for themselves they kind of bombed. They are not use to that. When you ask them follow up questions they assume the first answer was wrong and change it. Going to have to work on that, it was only my first day of teaching.
For grade 6 I was suppose to help teach a lesson on writing application letters, but at the last minute we did a lesson on haiku so they could get poems put in the biannual school paper.
Thursday school is cancelled for all but those that paid to participate in a science day and Friday is a teacher day. So no school really on either of those days . Just another week in the life of a volunteer.

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