Aparently crayon can write on clothing….(aka what my first graders learned today)

This has been a relatively short week (only 4 days) because Monday there was no school (the town gets to chose three days a year to have off and one of those was Monday).

Tuesday, I saw the three-year-olds. Ana and I tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to teach them the words “boy” and “girl.” They’re really good at saying hello and goodbye, and they can count to three. That’s about it though. Their activity book is really stupid – it has the kids matching stickers with shapes. The problem is that each kid gets a book and an entire pack of stickers. Their task was to take the sticker of boy 1’s face and put it in the box below the drawing of his face (aka the one that matched the sticker) and then trace a line between the drawing and the sticker. They took out more stickers than necessary, which isn’t their fault. They are given an envelope with tons of stickers inside it. Half of them figured out that the square sticker goes in the square box (although most of them rotated it). The rest put the stickers on top of the drawn faces or on a different page all together. Then, instead of drawing lines, they take their crayons and draw everything possible. Some of them covered every inch of white space on the page. Ana freaked out that the kids weren’t tracing the lines, but were coloring everywhere. What any of this has to do with English is way beyond me.

After that, I had science with second grade. They are learning about food and the food pyramid. My job was to review food vocabulary with them. I wrote “vegetable,” “fruit,” “meat,” “fish,” “dairy,” and “grains” on the board and had them tell me a food and where to put it. They got so into the activity that they started asking me about foods they did not already know. These included pomegranate (it’s a common fruit here), lentils, and leche merengada (which apparently translates to meringue milk). They were somewhat angry when I told them that leche merengada not only didn’t translate, but also didn’t exist in the US. Apparently it’s milk with cinnamon and other spices. They also wanted to know what category sandwich went under, I had to explain that only simple foods could go in the list and a sandwich combined several food groups. The kids were so poorly behaved. They didn’t listen at all and spent most of the class shouting out names of foods. The science teacher was pretty pissed at them and she told the homeroom teacher who made them write all of the foods in their notebooks several times.

Wednesday I had English with the second graders who were better behaved. I had them play a game that practiced “in” and “on.” Two children would come to the front and I would say, “put the pencil case on the table” (these are their vocab words). Some of them were pretty good, but others would hear this and put the scissors in the bag.

On Wednesday, David had to go to Córdoba for a meeting with all of the bilingual teachers. This meant I was on my own with 5A and 5B. (A teacher was present in the room to control them, but I was in charge of the lesson.) Amazingly enough, 5B were angels. Three students were absent which certainly helped. They did the activities and sung the song I had to teach them. They didn’t seem that interested in the work, but then again, they never do. Later in 5A, they did not behave as well as 5B and I told them that. This made them shut up and start behaving much better. When 5B is frequently referred to as the “worst class in the school,” you do not want to be the class that behaves worse. Both classes are working on countries and weather. They have a list of eight countries which includes both the USA and the UK (written as such). The students are convinced that, in English, we say these as the oo-sa and the uke (like puke without the p). I told them that I never want them to say the oo-sa ever again.

After all their activities, I gave them a worksheet for homework. Homework almost never gets done. Like always, there are some students that do everything they are given and come in with their stuff together. However, the majority of the kids don’t bring the right books and rarely do anything (inside or outside the classroom). There really aren’t penalties for not doing homework; the teacher just tells them they should have done it. Part of the homework was the favorite activity of the Spanish school system: coloring. Yes, that’s right, even the 5th graders are still coloring. I can’t believe it. It makes some sense to have first graders color (occasionally), but having fifth graders color for homework they’re not even going to do?? Seriously? I’m getting sick of all the coloring activities. Coloring reflects laziness on both the teacher’s and the student’s part. Teachers don’t have to put that much effort into classes if their students spend 20 of every 60 minutes coloring. Students don’t have to think as much if they are coloring instead of doing vocabulary practice or speaking activities.

Today (Thursday), I saw the first graders for science and then for English. This is the smallest class in the entire school: there are only ten students. HOWEVER, they are awful. For science class they were learning about sports and exercise (fitness as a means of a healthy life). I made them a sheet where they had to connect the word (in English) to the picture for various sports. After they accomplished this, they were allowed to color the sheet (I’m guilty of the coloring crutch too). One girl, Rosalía, doesn’t do anything during class. She just sits there. Nothing motivates her. Instead of coloring her sheet, she took her crayon and colored Elisea’s arm, getting red crayon on a pink shirt. I had honestly never seen crayon write on clothing like this. Elisea, who is probably the smartest kid in the class, started to cry because, in first grade, when someone colors on you, you cry. Their teacher was busy trying to break up a fight between two other students who were hitting each other for no good reason. These kids are always hitting each other and they never stay in their seats.

Later, in English class, I read them a “story” from their stupid English books. This book series is absolutely ridiculous. The “story” had four illustrated box. The words were (1) “Look! Look! Come in and see!” (2) “My school….” (3) “My friends….” (4) “….and me!” The pictures showed Danny the blue and red dinosaur on the playground. The only activity to go along with the “story” was to take the four boxes (mixed up on the next page) and put them in order. Oh, and then to color the white spaces in the second set of boxes. I had the kids play a game instead. I took them all to the back of the room and made them sit in a circle. When I said “girl,” I made the girls stand (and “boy” for the boys). Then I gave them blue and red pens and made them raise them when I said the color. I alternated blue, red, boy and girl. Some of them liked the game, but most of them started to get too out of hand and were throwing themselves on the floor. I had to make sure to put them in the circle in a special order keeping some of them apart which was somewhat challenging. After class, they were walking back to their homeroom and one girl’s skirt fell down…all the way to her ankles. She has thick tights on so you couldn’t see anything. It was hilarious. She’s Andrea, the one who is always dressed in a fashionable way. Apparently her mother is really young and somewhat trashy (according to David) and you can see this in the way the girl is dressed. She clearly needs a belt or a smaller skirt (it was too big for her). She could also stand to wear longer skirts because the ones she wears are super short.