I decided that as I am beginning my second field experience, I would start blogging on it! This might be a weekly thing or daily - we'll see!
I go to Price Lab School Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for a few hours in the morning. I was fortunate enough to be placed in an Elementary Spanish classroom. Though I will not teach Spanish when I graduate, the type of learning these students are doing I'm sure will be similar to the teaching I will do when I'm with an ESL classroom. I am mostly there with third grade classes, but I also see sixth graders. There is quite a difference in these classes! My cooperating teacher is fantastic, and obviously loves what she is doing.
October 31 - November 2 is el Día de Los Muertos for many Spanish-speaking countries, so the third grade learned a lot of the cultural things about this day. They talked about how the day is often compared to America's Halloween, even though there are virtually no similarities between the two holidays. They learned about the altars that are made in memorial of those who have passed away. Their fun activity was to decorate a skull mask. Then on Wednesday we marched around the room with our masks to this song! My teacher had a cassette tape she used for years for this activity, but unfortunately lost it. She had a CD for a song that would work, but not as well as she would have liked. I suggested we try searching on YouTube, and we found this. It wasn't the exact song, but it worked very well! The students enjoyed it as it was upbeat and they could figure out what the song was talking about from the (cute!) animation.
The sixth graders are working on a food unit right now. In two weeks they will go to a Mexican restaurant and store, where they will be expected to order and speak in Spanish as much as possible. I think this is such a great field trip idea! In my Spanish classes in high school we never did something as real as this. This field trip is really requiring the students to learn the vocabulary properly.
I haven't taken a Spanish class in two semesters, so being in the sixth grade class is especially forcing me to learn the vocabulary again! (I was never the best at vocabulary while I was taking Spanish anyway!) So far I am really enjoying my very early mornings at Price Lab! I can't wait for the following weeks!
