OK, for any of you wondering where I am working at, here are some pictures of the classroom I will be assisting in! The class I have specifically been assigned to is P1 (Primary 1/first grade) this is for roughly 6 year old children. Many teachers have told me that this class is difficult to maintain as children tend to not listen and their concentration levels can get low - especially after lunch. But I have decided to take an optimistic approach towards this new challenge! ^^
So, here are some pictures of the first grade classroom (English side) ...yes, in each grade there are two classrooms. One for the lessons being taught in Spanish and one for the lessons being taught in English!
The classrooms are spacious with lots to offer for the children. As you can see in the pictures, the school encourages lots of reading, writing, investigating. Here they believe that children should experiment new things for themselves and help each other learn in order to create collective ideas.
The classroom is organised into four different sections: 1. Reading 2. Writing 3. Art 4. Investigating. This is so that the children are given the opportunity to learn English through different activities. Children tend to get bored easily at school so everything must be made fun for them! Just like British schools, there is a 'reading corner' which I especially like. There are plenty of books for the children to choose from and I look forward to having them read to me. I've been informed that the children's English is very minimal and so, I'm really excited to try and improve their English speaking and writing skills. SEK is a very technological school...don't underestimate private schools over here. ALL students and I am talking about infants to high school students have access to iPads to play on or to use for research. In my opinion, I find this very strange but that's how they do things here...
Parents Evening
So on 03.09.2015, it was parents evening for Primary students. This allowed me to briefly meet majority of the class' parents and the children too. In total, there are 20 students in our class and oh, are they cute! I said to my tutor, "the children are so cute!" and her response was "they're cute now but they won't be cute next week when they start school" xD this made me laugh! I can imagine how rebellious these kids can be! Some parents could speak English so it was easy to converse with them when Mako introduced me to them. It was rewarding to talk to the parents who were already thanking me for being an English assistant to their children... I haven't started yet but they are already saying thank you. It made me feel warm inside and that I genuinely can't wait to assist these children and help them as much as I can during the 10 months I am here for.
There was a meeting with the teachers, children and parents in which I was introduced to everyone. I am the only assistant in P1 so I am the only native English speaker there to help support the children. A lot of parents expressed their feelings towards me to my tutor. They mentioned that it is great to have a native speaker helping her and they look forward to seeing their children's English progress this year. Throughout the second meeting, I was able to observe the different types of children that would be attending our class. There were a group of loud children who didn't stop talking to each other and there were children who seemed quite reserved and stuck by their parents. Now I understand why my teacher said what she said. I can imagine that these children will be very hard to keep quiet when needed!
- Tiffany
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