Ometepe Bilingual School

Ometepe Bilingual School Classes

2010-11-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

Morning Class
In the morning class I usually worked with one student in particular named Edalia. Edalia does not attend regular school but she can communicate in English quite well. The first week that I worked with her I got her to read several storybooks to me to find out what her reading level was, and did some vocabulary by having her pick the appropriate word for a sentence. We also covered and did lots of practicing on identifying nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The last week I was there we covered some verb tenses: simple present, simple past, simple progressive and past progressive. She is able to comprehend the rules for a particular verb tense, but in the last couple of days of class when I tried to get her to identify what verb tense she needed to use she found this more difficult.

For other students that came to class less regularly, we would often have vocabulary/translation worksheets ready for them to work on. First we asked them to identify as many as they could without a dictionary, but then would provide an English-Spanish dictionary. If time permitted we would also try and test the children on this new vocabulary. Also depending on a student’s level we may also have had them arrange flash cards with written numbers, days of the week, and months. If a student was more advanced, they were asked to identify an appropriate word to complete a given sentence.

Afternoon Class

We covered the date, “my name is” and “his/her name is “, alphabet, numbers up to thirty, family vocabulary, and shapes and colours. We divided the children into two groups ages 7+ and under 7. I took the younger group and we worked on the alphabet. Most of the kids in this age group could sing the abc’s, but most had trouble identifying letters out of order. I would use flash cards which they loved, or made my own alphabet cards that kids would put in order and then colour and decorate after. We practiced identifying the sounds of letters, and would also review numbers, colours and shapes. As a group we would practice songs such as Head and Shoulders, Row, Row, Row your Boat, and the Itsy Bitsy Spider.

The 7+ students did all of the above and started to learn how to tell time, read, spell, and perfected the vocabulary in the songs we would sing. We brought A LOT of stickers with us and they served as a great way to motivate the kids and keep them on track.

Evening Class

With the intermediate class, which was mostly made up of kids in high school we focused on verb tenses. We did a lot of practice on simple present, simple past, and present progressive, past progressive, future simple and progressive. I went over each in detail and gave lots of examples. Once I felt that the group was comfortable with these concepts I would mix up the verb tenses in worksheets and then they would have to identify which verb to use. One student in particular, Vilma, is more advanced and I did begin to cover irregular verbs with her. I would always leave some free time at the end of class for reading or questions. Many of them would be at the appropriate level for reading compression.

The advanced class would also arrive in the evening. They are most keen to work on grammar and we went over the following tenses:

Present simple, perfect and progressive
Past simple, perfect and progressive
Future simple, perfect and progressive

We also went over prepositions of time and place and irregular verbs (past and past participles).

Horacio, Darwin and Alberto are the most advanced students and all of the above concepts were a review for them which they found relatively easy and made few mistakes. Alberto enjoys reading comprehension, but there is a lack of appropriate books for him to read. He is 13 and has read the first Harry Potter book. He said that he enjoyed it, but he found it difficult. If you are able to supply some books for the school, I would recommend some low level chapters books. Horacio and Alberto both have an interest in space and I’m sure they would enjoy some books on this subject.

Noldan and his sister Maria are also in the advanced class, but are at a slightly lower level. Noldan has very good conversational English, but Maria is shy when she is asked to speak (although her written is good). These two benefitted the most from the grammar lessons and were keen to learn.

I would say that the greatest challenge with the advanced students was finding activities and lesson plans that were beneficial and interesting for them. They were not as motivated to work on mini projects that applied their English as they were to do grammar lessons. They all enjoyed simply talking and learning through conversation. I also taught them the game “20 Questions” which was fun and would start conversation.

Suggested Supplies/Activities:

• Workbooks/worksheets of all levels
• Whiteboard markers!!! (We had dry erase workbooks that the little kids LOVED but all 12 of our markers were dry by the 4th day! They are also very useful for teaching the advanced/intermediate students on the whiteboard)
• Supplies for any games/sports you would like to do
• English-Spanish dictionaries (the morning students did a lot of translations, but there is only one dictionary at the school)
• The students like challenges and some had t-shirts that a previous teacher had brought as prizes for the challenge week she set up
• Pencils, markers, crayons
• Stickers

*Some of these supplies you can get in Nicaragua, but are not easily accessible in Merida*

Ometepe Bilingual School September 2010

2010-09-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Rachelle and I (Stephanie) were the most recent English teachers at the Ometepe Bilingual School. We are both Canadian university students. We taught the students for a total of 3 weeks (August 29-September 17th) and had a phenomenal time. The kids are amazing and it was a great experience.

In the morning we taught an intermediate/advanced class and we worked on things such as the present and past simple and progressive tenses, writing activities, and translations.

In the afternoon a group of 10-20 little kids came to the school. They are very cute and excited to learn! We worked on their counting and ABC skills, reading, colours, days of the week, telling time and (their favourite) singing English songs. We gave out lots of stickers and they loved them!

At night the intermediate/advanced students came back and we would review our morning lesson and continue on to some new topics.

Weekends were a great opportunity to take advantage of all the available activities. We hiked to the waterfall, kayaked to Monkey Island, visited some other towns on Ometepe and went to the Ojo de Agua.

We will be following this post up with another more detailed description of what we covered with the students. Hopefully this will assist future teachers at the Ometepe Bilingual School!

2010-08-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

Hello,
So unfortunately, the other volunteers were unable to stay to teach, so when we, Dan and Jessica, leave on Wednesday, there will be no volunteers, but to the next volunteers, here is an update of what we have taught since our last post.
With the little kids class we have since covered:
-days of the week
-identifying the day, month, and year in the date
-alphabet, vowels and consonants, and pronounciation of the different vowel sounds
-numbers, counting from 1-20, and by tens
-clothing vocab
-colors
-I have
-I like
-food
-distinguishing between I, you, he, she, we, they
-we have also given them about 15 minutes a day to read bilingual books

The advanced teen class has covered the following tenses and subjects:
-Present simple, perfect, progressive, perfect progressive
-Past simple, progressive
-Future simple, progressive
-contractions
-should, would, could, and restaurant dialouge (we combined the advanced class with the intermediate class for this)
-we have done a lot of dialouges and informal conversations in English

Darwin and Alberto started coming to class in the morning and we covered these topics with them:
-Prepositions of time and location
-Past perfect, past perfect progressive tenses
-A LOT of informal English conversations
-reading and writing activities

In the intermediate teen group we covered alot of ground this week. We performed our interviews with tourists. This went very well and was a lot of fun.
We also covered
-The present progressive tense
- The future "will"
-Modal verbs will, can, should, could, would, must and might
-We did a restaurant dialogue and an interview to practice the modals

Volunteer Update July 22, 2010

2010-07-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-18T16:40:00.000-07:00

2010-07-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Welcome to the Ometepe Bilingual School Blog. This blog has been created as a means of communication between volunteers at the school, students, and supporters.