Friday, March 4

Our first week of school has gone by very quickly. It was the students’ second week of school for this year so today in the morning they finished with some pre-evaluations. The evaluations were in Spanish, one was math and the other was reading comprehension and some spelling as well. The next round of evaluations will be at the end of next month. In the afternoon today (during the English part of the day) our students completed their writing projects about their first day of school. During the last couple hours I went to the junior 5 group to discuss carnival (the holiday this weekend similar to our mardi gras) and to give them a chance to practice English and to ask some questions about America. After that I went to help the literature teacher with library time by reading some books aloud to a junior 2 class and then rejoining my students for their library time and reading aloud to them as well. The library of English books that the school has is a couple of large boxes that they bring up to the cafeteria where the students sit and listen to a story and then pick out a book to check out for the week. This period is very similar to what my American students do for library time but they do not have as large of a book collection to choose from. After these read-alouds I went up to the junior 6 group to talk with them about our family traditions in the United States. The are reading the book The War With Grandpa so the discussion was mainly focused on family life, but we also talked about family traditions such as Thanksgiving. This completed our tour of each class so we have had a chance to talk with all the classes and answer questions that they have about us and our lives in America. Next week we will continue to work with the upper grades on some different writing projects as well as our daily routines with our Junior three groups. Next week carnival is on Monday and Tuesday so we have a long weekend. From what we learned from the Junior 5 group today it seems as though carnival is a big multi day celebration with lots of food in the streets, decorations made out of old cloths hanging all over, live music, dancing in the heat, and people throwing lots of water around to cool off. It sounds like fun to me and I will post more about the details after I experience it.