Term started today for all students at SEK El Castillo. Students began to arrive between 09:15-09:30am in which they were all assigned a seat in the classroom at the desks by Mako. In case I haven't clarified this in the previous posts, Mako is my tutor and the teacher I assist. So, after all 20 students were seated and settled, it was reading time. My first job was to distribute a book to each student for them to start reading and once they had finished, they were to raise their hand so that I could see they were ready to move onto the next story book. As this is an private international school, I have been told to not expect too much from the students as English is their second language and on top of that, the students are just 5-6 years old. I felt as though most of the students were just looking at the illustrations and not actually reading but there was the odd few who I could hear reading aloud. I decided to randomly select children to read one sentence or a couple of words to me just to test their reading skills - it was better than I expected however some students lacked confidence in speaking English to me.
After the morning reading session, the students were taken on a small tour around the school. The tour included a viewing of the male/female bathrooms (toilets), the dining hall, sports hall and the playground. The children always walked in a line when walking to each area - this was quite interesting to witness as they were being co-operative with Mako and being good. Most students would run off or mess around. By giving the students a tour of the school, it enhanced their vocabulary as they now understood the names of the different areas and understood what their purposes were, in English. A drawing and colouring activity was then given to keep the students active and engaged. This involved a outline drawing of their hands in which myself and Mako helped them with. It made me chuckle when the children started to giggle as I was drawing around their hands because it tickled! They were given time to decorate their 'paper' hands and were strongly encouraged to be as creative as possible.
Break time! The kids' favourite part of the day...30 minutes to run around, play football and play tig with their friends from other classes. As teachers, we are assigned playground duties to observe the children and make sure everyone is OK. It's great to see children smiling and having fun... reminded me of the past when I was in primary school! ^___^
Following break time was reading and writing time. The class were split up into groups of reading and writing so that they could practice their comprehension skills. Mako worked with the writing groups and I worked with the reading group. The vocabulary that they were practising/learning were the school objects and things in a school... for example, pencil, pen, ruler, rubber, desk and so on. With the reading, we used the SmartBoard to read sentences from an online book. This was my first task that involved full on interaction with the students and I have to admit that I was a little nervous. I was worried that the children would not listen to me or that they would not understand what I am saying. Luckily enough, the students listened well and read near-perfect sentences back to me. I was very impressed...however, I realised that the children could read but did not genuinely understand what they were reading - does this make sense? I would ask them to read a sentence or a word and would ask the following question of "what is this? can you describe it to me?" and there would be no response or a shrug of the shoulder. After realising that the children lacked knowledge on the objects within the sentences from the online story book, I decided to use the flashcards that I prepared a few days ago during training week. I asked the students to read the flashcard and also asked them to tell me what it was/where it was within the classroom or school. I felt that this activity/game produced better responses from the students as they could identify the different objects inside the classroom and were able to point outside to the playground. When asked "where are the teachers" they pointed at myself and Mako... When asked "how many teachers are there in this classroom?" they answered 2. Being given this reading time, it allowed me to identify the stronger readers and the less confident ones. Some students took no longer than 10 seconds to read the sentences and flashcards whereas some could not read the word at all. I hope I can work with the less confident readers to improve their reading and pronunciation skills. I can definitely see huge potential in the students...
Lunch time! The second favourite part of their day... it was a busy busy cafeteria. The students had to be seated and looked after. Children are taught to not waste their food so they must try their best to eat everything on the plate. When they wish to move onto the next plate, they raise their hand to ask for permission. Here, I was monitoring the students and helping them with their drinks. They get an option of water or chocolate milk. Of course the jugs are too big and heavy for them to pour so the teachers assist whenever a child has sat down to eat. The cafeteria was extremely busy and loud that I couldn't hear myself thing. We were able to have our own lunch upstairs in the teacher's area after our class had gone outside to play for the remaining of their lunch.
As expected, the children's attention spans decrease incredibly after lunch. I noticed that more "shh" were enforced after they'd come back from lunch time. At this point, the children were told to tidy up their desks from before and to organise the classroom. The aim is to teach the students about organisation inside and outside the classroom. Like well behaved students, they listened to the instructions well and tidied up the classroom quite nicely. The school hours here at SEK are much longer than British schools... the school day doesn't end until 5:30pm so therefore another break time is allowed for the students in which they are given a snack. Today was an apple or a sandwich. And once again, we were on playground duty, ensuring children weren't mis-behaving! Shortly after was a sort of wind down time and time to get ready to aboard their buses. The children are assigned to different routes and they must give the correct route number/name or else they will be stuck at school or get on the wrong bus home. This was very stressful for Mako as some of the students did not know where they were going - some seemed pretty clueless. I can't blame them though...they are just kids! But anywho, the students were divided into bus groups and those who were being picked up by their parents. It was rather difficult for the students to follow the teacher to the correct pick up place as there were so many students finishing then and they are only little...even I got a little lost at one point with one student following me. After all students had been taken to their buses, myself and Marko were able to call it a day - hoorah!! I felt so relieved!!
It was an interesting first day, getting to know the students how the school works on a regular day. I look forward to learning many more things about the school and how their education differs to England. And what I'm most looking forward to is supporting the students to improve their English in speaking, reading and writing. I want to be able to help them as much as I can in the next 9 months and hopefully I will be able to see some sort of progress when I finish in June.
So there we have it - my first day of being a 'teacher'. (They call me a second teacher here, not a teaching assistant!)
- Tiffany
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