Monday I sung "One, two, buckle my shoe" with the five year olds. They are such a great group of kids and I loved singing/dancing this song with them. They do the numbers and I say the words. And we jump up and down at the end, which is their favorite part (until we "do it again" ... you know, "nine, ten, do it again!").
I also went to fourth-grade music and taught them "Wheels on the Bus." I love fourth grade. It's a huge class (25 students), but the kids are so nice and have such defined personalities. Their level of English is the highest in the school, so you do tons of fun activities with them.
Tomorrow, their teacher and I are taking them on a walking tour of Priego. Each child had to learn one or two sentences about the places we're visiting. On Monday, I took small groups to the teacher's room to practice their sentences. I think this is one of the faults of the teachers in my school: they rarely have me working with small groups of kids. This is the third time this year that I've taking kids into the hallway to work in groups or individually. It seems to work really well. Yes, we should do activities as a class, but sometimes kids are more comfortable talking in front of fewer people. Also, they think it's fun and different to be hanging out in the hall or teacher's room. It's like a game or something and they don't realize they are actually learning at the same time.
At the end of the day, Ana and I took fourth grade to the computer room to play some online games about sports. These kids seriously need a designated computer class. Half of them don't have any idea how to turn the computer on. The rest are so excited they start touching every single button. It's generally pandemonium. I had found some links for "fun" games and others for vocabulary games. There was one vocab game in particular that the kids were prepared for (the words were ones we had covered in class). I wanted them to start with this and then move onto the "fun" games, which were essentially video games.
Ana had written the link wrong and no one could seem to get to the vocab game. I quickly figured out how to find it, but she was busy directing the kids to much harder games. She didn't realize what she was doing and the kids were totally confused. I tried to explain it to her, but she didn't seem to care. So, I had to go around to all of the computers and pull up the correct game one-by-one. By the time I got to the last computers, the first groups of kids were already finished and wanted to move on to the "fun" games. The rest of the kids saw this and wanted to follow suit. It was slightly chaotic.
Tuesday I did a speaking activity with sixth grade. It actually seemed to work pretty well. I wrote out each kid's name on little slips of paper and put them in a plastic bag. I also wrote out questions involving the future tense and put those slips into another bag. Kids came to the front of the room to pick a person's name and a question. They had to stand in the front and ask their question. Then the kid answering had to come up and ask the next question. It worked really well at the beginning because a lot of the kids' names were still in the bag. Towards the end, no one paid attention because they had already gone.
Ana and I also took third grade to the computers. We did the same activity as fourth grade, but this time I was able to correct her improperly-written link. Some of the kids really enjoyed the vocabulary games and barely played the "fun" games, which made me really happy. Ana screamed at this class for most of the hour, which was annoying, as usual. I'm not sure how she gets her voice to go as high as it does.
Wednesday was my "light" day. I had a coordination period with Antonio, the science/social studies teacher for third and fourth grades. He and I have been planning this walking field trip around Priego. We lined the kids up in the classroom and made them practice their sentences. One kid would say his sentence and the kid across from him in the line would translate it. Then they would switch tasks. Some kids were really good at it, and others had a lot of difficulty. They were a little crazy/off the wall, but mostly they did a good job.
Tomorrow (Thursday) we'll go on our walk. I'm not sure how this is going to work: it's just Antonio and I with 22 (three are punished and not allowed to come) kids.
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