Wednesday, September 28, 2011

From Boston to San José...

We have been very pleased to welcome volunteers from Northeastern University who are working with our Language Corners in Curridabat (the Municipal Library, and the library of 15 de Agosto School in Tirrases). They will continue leading Story Hour and supplementary activities at these sites during October and November. At left, the volunteers read with students at the Municipal Library on Children's Day (the book: "How do Dinosaurs Go to School?", by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague). For more information, stay tuned to this site! Thanks so much to Bharat, Jonathan, Mitchell, Anna, Justine and Peter, along with their professor Noel Habashy and the International Center for Development Studies, for making these sessions possible.

1 comment:

  1. Today was the best day of service learning so far by far. We actually got to go through with our plan and read one of the books and then split the kids up into groups. We had three different groups of kids, some were about 6 and 7 and then we also had 1st and 3rd graders. The weirdly surprising thing is that the 1st graders seemed to know more English than the 3rd graders.

    The school that we are teaching at is in a kind of suburb of San Jose almost in the mountains and feels forgotten. It is about a thirty minute bus ride from plaza del sol and we were told as soon as we were on the bus not to pull out our cell phones or ipods or anything because the area we were going to was a lot more dangerous than San Pedro. The bus stop is directly across from the school so we don't have to wonder around the city or anything. When we got there the English teacher was super friendly and seemed to have a really good command over the kids, which was very impressive.

    They were some of the sweetest kids I have ever gotten to hang out with. First, we read them a book as a big group and tried to get a little bit of vocab in. Today it was a book about a dog and so we taught some animal vocab and some other random things that popped up. Next we split into groups and depending on the age of our group, choose an activity. For the youngest group we mostly just played with blocks and I got them to learn a few things like please and thank you. But they didn't seem to want to do more than that or be able to remember more so we mostly just bonded and built towers and ice cream cones together. The second group was a little bit older so when we broke up into groups I read them another book, going over the vocab, and then we also played with lego type things but we made what we were talking about. so if we were learning the word for car, we would make a car. The third group was probably the most gratifying because I got to see a lot of improvement just in the 30 minutes that I had them for. First we learned to introduce ourselves and then we moved on to simon says and many other games. At the end it was super cute because all of the little girls kissed me goodbye and remembered my name and then for the next 15 minutes while we were in the room they kept stopping by to say goodbye. I am super excited to keep working there and I have such a good time today that is wasn't like anything I expected.

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