We, Jessica and Dan from the US, are the current volunteers at the Ometepe Bilingual School. We wanted to share with you what we have been doing with each of our classes and who are regular students are. When we started teaching here, we did not know where the students were at with their English, what they had learned before, or what they needed to learn to succeed on the English Tests to get into University. So we have started this blog, to keep all present and future volunteers up to date with the happenings at OBS! We hope this will be a handy resource!
We have been teaching here for 1 week now, and we have 2 weeks to go. Two new volunteers, Jenny and James from Australia, will be joining us next Monday. We have 2 classes. One class of little kids ages 2-9, who come at 2. Fatima, a mother of one of the kids, gathers the kids and walks them here and home. We teach for about an hour and a half, and around 3:30 we go to have snack. We have created a routine that we follow daily to create a sense of consistency and to help them learn basic classroom language. Fatima arrives with them and they line up at the sink to wash their hands. We encourage them to use the bathroom at this time so they are not getting up in the middle of class. We always have the classroom set up, so they can come in and sit down. We begin with a greeting. So far they know "Good Morning, and Good Afternoon Students!" The kids reply "Good Afternoon or Morning Teachers!" We go over the date in English. We have taught them the days of the week. Then we go out in the garden and have Circle Time. We go around the circle and say "I am, he/she is." Today we will start with "My name is, his/her name is." We taught the class a song to prepare them to sit down and start class.
So far we have taught the following things:
-I, he, she
-Animals
-Body parts
We used pictures, diagrams, games, ,and songs to reinforce these lessons.
Our next class begins at 5:30. and ends at 7. This class consists of teenagers and young adults. These students are very driven and eager to learn. It is truly a pleasure to teach such interested students. This class has a wide range of English levels so we have split the students into two groups.
One group consists of our intermediate level students. In this group we do many communicative activities to bolster their speaking abilities as well as basic grammar and vocabulary. This group is very enthusiastic, we have a lot of fun and laugh a lot. Even with this easy going and fun environment we cover a lot of material each class and the students have made substantial and concrete improvements in their speaking abilities.
We have covered
-Adjectives
-Family vocabulary
-Question formation- Where are you from? What do you do for a living? What do you like to do? What is your______ like.
-Professions
-Pass times
-Possessive adjectives
-Nationalities
The other group consists of our most advanced students. These students all have a considerably high level of fluency and are determined to bring the abilities to the next level so that they can continue there studies at Ave Maria University. These students have been receiving very focused instruction on finer grammatical points of the English language, focusing primarily on the tenses. So far we have covered the Present Simple, Present Progressive, Present Perfect, and Present Perfect Progressive tenses, along with count and non count nouns, contractions, and practicing communicating in English. This group consists of the following students, all who are currently enrolled in Ave Maria University (3rd level), or are preparing to take the test to become an enrolled student(1st-2nd level).
Horacio-3rd level
Alberto- 3rd level
Darwing-2nd level
Maria-2nd level
Noldan-1st level
Eugeine-1st level
David-1st level
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