Day 10: Tenth day

Today I have gone to the reading session during the first minutes. I arrived early and the student from Pakistan sat in front of me, as usual. I had brought my book and controlled the students picked up one as well and read. As more students were coming, they sat at the end of the class, and I told the one from Pakistan that we were the brave ones for sitting in the first row. He laughed and said something similar in English too.

Then he picked up a book about the romans and I told him Romulus and Remus were said to be the founders of Rome, having been brought up by a female wolf, or what is the same: “that the hyena was a female wolf in truth, which had looked after the siblings when they were babies.” We said it was interesting and the teacher arrived and asked some students to read aloud.

When we came back to the English class, the teacher gave a teacher-centered lesson explaining the formation of regular and irregular verbs in past, building up a chart from the students’ examples. There was little to do here, except to help some children with specific doubts about some verbs’ past tenses. The session was clear and the students got an accurate idea.

In the second hour, the sixth grade students were finishing their “saving the Earth” drawings and proposals so as to send these to the ones in charge of the project, in hope to compete against other schools participant in it. While the students finished, the teacher reviewed the students’ exam corrections and asked the ones who had finish to classify a bountiful set of object flashcards into their belonging recycling bins. A lot of interesting vocabulary came up, and some students were copying the words they did not know in their notebooks, in order to remember them. I was helping them with some words, like “ink cartridge”, and I learnt some others, such as “cutlery”. When we finished we went to the playground.

Back in P5 class, I tried to copy the music festival recordings I had made into the teacher’s computer, but the system did not support such big files, so I had to change my plans and try to send them to her through the internet. During the lesson, the children worked with the digital blackboard, and I helped the students with some doubts about clothes, the topic they were learning through the games played at the digital blackboard.

In the afternoon a child explained her science project, which was really interesting: being it about the decomposition of light into different colors. 

Later on, the 5^th grade students were asked the exam corrections made some speaking review activities related to the sentence formation of “there is/there are” both in their positive and negative sentences in questions, answers and statements. At the end of the class, some students played a game consisting on filling the blanks with words belonging to a specific semantic field beginning with the given letter. It was fun and one student who did not apparently have such a good English level as his peers surprised everyone with his huge word list.