La educacion como una fuerza liberadora (Education as a liberating force ~ from 7/13/10)

During three days this week, we spent time working on an English camp. Our camp was centered around the Costa Rican nutrition involving building, energy, and regulatory foods. (Each of the categories are just as they sound energy-rice, bread,etc; building-proteins like chicken; regulatory-fruits in vegetables to get the digestive show running). To me, this divsion makes a lot more sense than what we have in the food pyramid, and I was glad to get the opportunity to hone my teaching chops. Each day, we had centers for the students to come & learn through playing games, creating recipes, and working as teams.



Since we all come from different backgrounds, with not all of those being educational, it was a trial to get all of us to create lesson plans and activities for a group of Costa Rican students from ages 5 to 12 while integrating English Language Acquisition. This task would be difficult enough for this age group and ability level in English, and it took some work to get to the point where we could facilitate the class interactions smoothly, but things fell into place. Once we decided on clear cut examples and stragegies, the worst part was over.

On the last day of the camp, our professor, Paula gave us a big push to restrain our conversations & teaching to English only. This was so that the students would be exposed to as much English as possibly. Coincidentally, this happened to be the day in which we were creating common foods from the United States. To refrain to English only was pretty hard since we are down here to try and improve our Spanish and that's what the kids understand. I guess my fear was that when we speak English, I wasn't sure how many of them would really get what we were saying. However, that's how English Language Teaching is done. And when I think back to my earliest learning of Spanish, I had moments of what?! I don't know what they're saying, but all of those things worked together to help me get used to the language in general.During this process, I have also thought about how much learning English could mean for these children as a way to walk between two worlds and cultures.



I'm definitely glad that I am getting the opportunity to work with these students because it's a great experience both teaching and working with language. It sort of seems surreal to be student teaching in less than a month. I guess that is because I have just been hanging out for the first part of the summer. It's strange that I will be responsible for other people when I get back. I will say that I am for the most part feeling positive and prepared but I know there is still a lot to learn...I'm ready!