After getting a good night's rest, I was up and running for today's lessons. Except, I was a little nervous, I wasn't working with my three/fours today and I had gotten to know some of the little cuties. This time I was moving up to intermediate, grades 7 and 8. Ashley is fluent in Spanish, so it was super helpful when it came to teaching older grades. Our lesson was focusing on Canada and its provinces and territories. Ashley had this beautiful map that came with cut outs (such as pictures of the mounties and Canadian coins, not to mention the beaver). We started off the lesson by getting the kids to repeat how to properly pronounce each place. Afterward, we lead them in a song to help them remember the provinces and territories more. It was really fun, especially the one class that loved the song so much they kept wanting to sing it, but every time, sing it faster and faster than the time before!! After the song, we showed them pictures that corresponded to each province etc (for example, the red soil of PEI and the Calgary Stampede) the kids, of course, loved the snow pictures the best (the igloos and dog sledding). Afterward, we gave each kid a map and some pencil crayons to colour it. It was really sweet to see how one of the teachers was so excited he wanted to colour his own map. During the map colouring, we had a question answer period. During that time, we ended up singing O Canada once, and I showed how to line dance. The kids were super cute and wanted Ashley and I's signatures and wanted to add us on facebook.
As the day went by, we discovered some of our classes were missing, again lol, but that didn't stop us. In fact, Ashley and I with the help of others who were left groupless too, went to the high school grades and taught a grade 10 class. It was really neat, since I started to understand how the older grades would feel left out of this experience since all of us were volunteering in the primary/junior grades for the most part. The kids were attentive and really took the map colouring seriously (for the most part) one boy wanted us to sit with him lol ... and the teacher took about a million pictures of us with the class.
After teaching, though we were tired (as we did yesterday, I forgot to mention in my last blog ...) we helped renovate the second school (the one the Guelph students were teaching at). Yesterday, I spent the majority of the time sweeping off the pavement as we were helping to paint new white boundary lines to play different sports. Others were painting the staircase a lovely bright green and others were doing the landscaping at the front, fixing the flower beds at the front. We worked from 2-3:30ish each day. Today, I joined the landscaping team, digging up old grass, raking in manure and moving decorative stones. The principle and student designer for the garden were so thankful for our help, it was very touching. We went back to the retreat center early today, than yesterday, so I had time to make a trip to Wong's to get more snacks and chocolate of course :) and stop at Starbucks to use to internet (and send some emails to ensure those back home were worry free) and again, savor a warm drink, it was cooler today and my voice was still not 100%. After dinner and our reflection (how I will miss Raoul's philosophical discussions) we had another night excursion, this time to a beautiful water fountain park. There were two really neat fountains you could actually run through (one was a sort of bridge, the other was almost game like, you had to make your way to the center without getting sprayed by the water that would shoot up under your feet (of course everyone got wet since it was impossible to plan).
I decided, since I had a bit of a cold and because I didn't want to be sick for Machu Picchu, I wasn't going to run through it since it was a chillier night, but it was fun to watch the others screaming and running and getting soaking wet lol. After we walked the huge park, we made our way to the centre and watched a spectacular light show, shown to us on the actual fountains, as they danced and splashed about. What an experience! I was tired from such an eventful day, but I wanted to make sure my lesson for the private school was packed since we had to wake up earlier the next day and I would be teaching on my own so I was feeling a little jittery but in other ways less nervous since the kids I would be with tomorrow spoke English making teaching significantly easier. After triple checking everything was packed, I finally went to bed.
As the day went by, we discovered some of our classes were missing, again lol, but that didn't stop us. In fact, Ashley and I with the help of others who were left groupless too, went to the high school grades and taught a grade 10 class. It was really neat, since I started to understand how the older grades would feel left out of this experience since all of us were volunteering in the primary/junior grades for the most part. The kids were attentive and really took the map colouring seriously (for the most part) one boy wanted us to sit with him lol ... and the teacher took about a million pictures of us with the class.
After teaching, though we were tired (as we did yesterday, I forgot to mention in my last blog ...) we helped renovate the second school (the one the Guelph students were teaching at). Yesterday, I spent the majority of the time sweeping off the pavement as we were helping to paint new white boundary lines to play different sports. Others were painting the staircase a lovely bright green and others were doing the landscaping at the front, fixing the flower beds at the front. We worked from 2-3:30ish each day. Today, I joined the landscaping team, digging up old grass, raking in manure and moving decorative stones. The principle and student designer for the garden were so thankful for our help, it was very touching. We went back to the retreat center early today, than yesterday, so I had time to make a trip to Wong's to get more snacks and chocolate of course :) and stop at Starbucks to use to internet (and send some emails to ensure those back home were worry free) and again, savor a warm drink, it was cooler today and my voice was still not 100%. After dinner and our reflection (how I will miss Raoul's philosophical discussions) we had another night excursion, this time to a beautiful water fountain park. There were two really neat fountains you could actually run through (one was a sort of bridge, the other was almost game like, you had to make your way to the center without getting sprayed by the water that would shoot up under your feet (of course everyone got wet since it was impossible to plan).
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