Tercer Dia

Our third day in school was great again. I think that I have learned all of the names of my students, remembering the difference between Julia, Julieta, y Juliet was the hard part. We did not have a special today and I was with the junior 3 class for the entire day. In the morning we worked on math in English. Our students are practicing counting by tens and hundreds as well as adding two digit numbers in the context of story problems. Our school does not have a photocopier so the teacher does not use as many work sheets as we do in our US schools; instead the students must copy all of their work in what they call their “copy book”. (I will try to post some pictures of students’ work in the future) I think that this procedure is beneficial for the students because during their math lessons they are working on dictation as they are expected to write neatly in cursive the story problems that the teacher either writes on the board or reads out loud to them. The students have a copy book for math with and a copy book for writing (Spanish) and a copy book for English. They are not spiral notebooks, but hard cover books with blank lined pages. During our Spanish writing time after math in the morning our teacher read a story out loud. The students were working on their comprehension as well as writing as they were asked to re-write a summary of the story in their copy books. Some students finish with their writing sooner than others; after they are checked by the teacher they were asked to draw a picture to accompany their summary. This is how our morning was spent and me and Stephanie went back to our apartment for a leftover cold pizza lunch. Last night we went to Pizza Mundo for dinner, a pizzeria that has eighty different pizzas on the menu. During one of our breaks I asked another teacher what is their favorite kind from Pizza Mundo and she told us it is napoletina, which has huevos duro (hard boiled eggs). After lunch the students must use only English. We talked about family and they asked me questions about my family and I asked them questions about theirs. I gave them as much vocabulary as I could and then the students wrote a paragraph about their family which they then read out loud to the class. After that I read a story aloud that they have been working on called The First Day of School, and then the students took turns either reading parts of the story out loud or retelling the story in their own words (depending on their confidence in English). Today was a good day and it was hot in the sun after school at the flag lowering. Tomorrow we are going to spend our last hour talking with the junior 4 class to help them hear and practice speaking English.