This week we have continued our review on ordinal and cardinal numbers and the English Alphabet. I have about 7 new students in my second and third year classes. The gap between what they know and the students who have been coming to Instituto El Rey since seventh grade is huge. It is not a gap in learning ability, but merely in achievement. The old students had studied the English Alphabet and numbers the previous years, had been taught by native English speakers, and remembered a significant amount of the material. The new students were completely learning from scratch and had a long way to go to keep on pace with the others.
I encouraged these students to come every day during lunch so that we could practice with the flash cards, work on pronunciation, and practice the oral distinguishing of numbers and letters. Many students took me up on my offer and did much better on the test when it came.
After our test on Wednesday, we spent the rest of the week having a grammar review. Our review was on the present tense conjugations of regular and irregular verbs. I really enjoy teaching grammar – especially to people who don’t speak English. It’s so fun to watch them understand patterns and come up with sentences on their own. (That reminds me that I need to look up the word “pattern” in the Spanish dictionary because I don’t know what it is and I’, having a hard time explaining it in English.)
Again, I found the 7 new students to be far behind the others. They didn’t know the meaning of commonly used verbs such as to be, to eat, to live, to have, and to want, and they certainly didn’t know how to conjugate them. Again, I asked them to come during lunch for some basic grammar, and many of them came.
I think Sharon and Esther are finding that the hardest things about accepting transfer students (students who don’t start in the seventh grade) is the English gap. This says two main things. First, our English program is really heads above others around because the students are exposed to and taught by so many native English speakers. And second, the new students and I might as well say good-bye to our lunch period.
Another interesting thing I’ve run across this week is how many students don’t like to exercise. Tom and I have been teaching a P.E. class on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and some of our students come up with every excuse they can think of so that they don’t have to run. Our class really wants to play soccer, so we’ve told them that after we have more order and can accomplish our goals, we’ll play soccer. What are our goals? Our two main goals are to run in three good lines side by side (there are around 40 students in the class, and we need to do this in order to keep everyone close together), and for the whole class to run for three minutes in a row without stopping. I never would have imagined how difficult this might be for some people, but it really is.
Yesterday (Thursday) almost everyone was able to run for the first three minutes. Then we walked for three minutes and ran our second three minutes and people slowly started dropping off. I guess we have a ways to go…
One really exciting thing happened yesterday. Since we are already wearing our running clothes on Tuesdays and Thursdays for P.E. (for me this is a running skirt of course), we usually get off the bus with the students in El Pital and run home. From where we get off to where we live in Las Mangas is exactly 3 miles. Well, this time when we got off, Duany, Elvis, Victor, Elder, Nury, and Carla all got off with us. They wanted to run home too! It was so fun, and we were such a troop clomping down the carretera.
That brings us to today: Dia del Padre. That’s right, Honduras celebrates a Father’s Day as well, and it is on March 19th. Each homeroom class is in charge of coming up with a menu for their class, collecting money, and organizing a group of cooks amongst themselves. My class is having chicken, salad, and cokes (of course). After lunch today we have a program, and all of Tom and my English classes will be singing our song, This is the Day, for the school. They are really excited about it, and we even practiced it together this morning on the bus.
All the teachers (except for unsuspecting us) came to school dressed in their best, ready for the celebration. Many of the students’ parents will be coming to celebrate together, and Sharon has baseball caps to give to all the fathers. So, altogether it should be a jolly celebration, and a good chance to get to know some of our students families.
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