A big, heart felt "THANK YOU" from the Colegio Tecnico Profesional Valle la Estrella JumpStart graduates!!!
Showing posts with label La Guaria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label La Guaria. Show all posts
2/6/13
Last week down...and they're off to 7th grade!
Friday, February 1st marked
the last day of La Guaria’s JumpStart camp. What a special day to end a very
special week! I’ll start from the beginning…
This past week the students learned to
tell time, to talk about different foods and ask for food in a restaurant
setting, they played fun games in order to review everything, they had their final interview, and we had a fun
visitor!
I am SO proud of each and every
student. I took a look at their first interview videos and then the final one
and am soooo impressed by the change. They have learned and retained a ton of
English.
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| Doing a practice called "Match Mine" |
Isenia had to attend a meeting one day
for the school, so my friend Lena came down to help out with class. The
students prepared interview questions for her ranging from “Do you have a
boyfriend?” to What’s your favorite fruit?”. Again, I felt so proud. Later we
learned how to give and receive directions in order to take Lena on a tour of
the high school (on which we lucked into seeing baby pigs!).
We also found the time to squeeze in a
little morning yoga. The kids really enjoyed doing something a little
different! My favorite part was when we all sat in circle, holding hands and
with our eyes closed. We were practicing “passing the energy”. I started by
squeezing the hand of the person to my right, and then they passed it on by
squeezing the hand of the person to his/her right and so on until the hand
squeeze returned back to me.
Class on Friday (our last day!)
started with an activity called “Say Something Nice Behind My Back”. At the
beginning of JumpStart each student received a notecard with his/her name on it
to place on the desk. For this activity the students taped the notecards to
their backs and then wrote nice, anonymous
comments on the notecards. We then danced the Cha Cha slide, followed by
some other English games, and ended the day with a mini “graduation” where each
student received a t-shirt and a certificate.
Cake and a slideshow of pictures were
the final treat to conclude an amazing English camp!!
1/28/13
2 weeks down, only 1 more to go!!
Holy smokes, the time sure does fly by
quickly! I have officially had 20 students in class for 10 days now, and we
only have 5 more days left together. Within this short time frame of 10 days I
have witnessed a group of students transform from quiet, shy 6th
graders into bold, talkative, ready-for-high school 7th graders.
Once upon a time these kids did not
know one another, and now they are a tight knit group of friends! It is amazing
to watch the confidence (not just in English) grow and friendships form among
them.
This past week we learned how to describe
people in regards to personality and physical appearance. The students learned
vocabulary like “outgoing”, “lazy”, “beautiful”, “red hair” etc. They also took
a look at body parts and clothing terminology. During one activity we had
students brainstorm a list of famous people (like batman, Lady Gaga, and Laura
Chinchilla). One student then came to the front and closed his/her eyes while
we secretly chose one of our famous people to describe. The students then
provided descriptions of the famous person (like “She is a musician.” “She is
ugly.” etc.) so that the student with his/her eyes closed could guess who we
were talking about!
The kids also participated in a relay
race to label body parts!
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| The winning team! |
One of my favorite games that the
class played was the classic “Guess Who” that I loved playing so much when I
was younger!!
They got the chance to design their
own monsters and then present them to the class!
My all time favorite moment from last
week was the amazing fashion show that some of the students volunteered to
participate in! They dressed up in crazy clothes provided by Isenia and yours
truly and paraded around the classroom as I flamboyantly announced what each
person was wearing.
I can hardly believe we have reached
our last week of JumpStart. Among other things this week, students are taking a
look at forming the present tense with a wide range of verbs and talking about
their likes and dislikes. We will also be doing our final “interviews” to
measure the students’ learning.
Only a few more days left before it’s
time to send the students off to 7th grade!! Check back later this week
to see pictures from our JumpStart graduation ;)
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| Playing a game called "Moose" before class |
1/23/13
Learning Vocabulary through Charades
The idea of this activity was that students learn new vocabulary for personality traits. Students volunteered to act out opposites while the rest of the class guessed what they were representing. These two represent “active” and “lazy”.
Two more students take part in the acting! They are representing “brave” and “cowardly”. The students had a blast!!
1/18/13
1 week down, 2 more to go!
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| Building a "spider web". They had to say 1 thing about themselves. |
Today marks the
end of week 1 for us here in La Guaria! It fleeeew by, and believe it or not,
in just a week’s time the kids have expanded their English abilities immensely
from where they started.
Coming in with little to no English
the kids can now carry on a basic conversation and ask and respond to a bunch
of questions (they’ve got mad interviewing skills!!) such as:
“What’s your name?”
“How are you?”
“What do
you do?”
“Where do
you live?”
“How old
are you?”
“Do you
have any ______(brothers, sisters, pets, etc)?”
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| Practicing asking each other questions |
One of
their favorite activities from the week was to play charades with the
occupations. We had two teams racing against one another to be the first to
guess who their actor/actress was mimicking. The signal to start acting was to
call out “What do you do?” They really got into the roles and had a blast!
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| Practicing Occupations via Charades |
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| Drawing community maps to answer "What do you live?" |
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| Practicing numbers |
On a different note during today's lesson on family, some of the students struggled today with the difference between when to use “do” vs “does” in forming a question. The third person in English seems to be a bit difficult! We’ll have to go over it again. I just hope that they remember to look over their English during the weekend!
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| Drawing their families |
As far as
next week goes, we’re going to jump right in learning about physical
characteristics and how to describe oneself!
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