On the day of our first class, I felt a bit nervous, had some butterflies in my stomach and felt slightly anxious. I wasn't sure quite what to expect, and was very unsure about whether all of our preparations would result in success.
The teachers that I would be working with all met in the classroom at 3:40 after getting our own children ferried home for the afternoon. We set up supplies, laid out the attendance chart, found the students' name tags, and then looked at each other.
We had really no idea what we had gotten ourselves into, and weren't 100% convinced that we would indeed be able to Make A Difference ... but soon enough it was 4:00 and time to go gather the students from the gate.
The students had walked from their homes to one of the gates at the school, and were waiting patiently for their first class.
We worked through our lesson plan utilizing a lot of smiles, quite a bit of joshing and mainly trying to earn the students' trust, respect and attention.
We had decided to use Have Fun Teaching and their Alphabet Song. We wanted to find a way to work through the alphabet in a fun way, that didn't seem to ... baby-ish.
The afternoon was moving along quite nicely. The students were engaged, well behaved and generally interested in everything we were sharing with them.
One of my favorite parts of the day? Reading!!
One of my other favorite parts of the day? When we asked the students to complete a self-portrait. We had populated their art journals with a half photograph of their face. Using a lot of hand motions and explaining the project through example, we watched them create "the other side of themselves."
Since the aim of our first class was to introduce ourselves and the schedule/layout of how our class would function, it was a huge success! We were walking on cloud nine and just pretty euphoric about how the afternoon had gone. We said our goodbyes at the end of class and one of the teachers walked the students back to the gate.
One set of teachers (3 total) teach these Level I students on Mondays, and a different set of 3 teachers teach the SAME students on Tuesdays. It creates a seemingly perfect setup, as no one teacher has a crazy heavy commitment and provides a good amount of diversity with the teaching styles amongst the six lead teachers.
On this first class day, we didn't get heavy into the lesson plan. The nitty-gritty of the curriculum that we had spent so much time developing was to be started the following week. The true test of whether we could actually do this was still yet to be discovered.
After Class One, we were able to simply clean up, give each other high fives and pack up the tubs of manipulatives and teaching aids.
We had started a journey with these students, made a commitment to them to show up every week, and teach them English. They made a commitment to us to show up every week, do their best, and learn English.
A good match, don't you think?
What will follow in the Make A Difference series of posts will likely be less of a chronological journey about each individual week of classes and more about sharing with you the process by which we evolved the Level I program, curriculum and what we are learning about ourselves and these students, along the way!
