Lately at Old Trail, I have been working with Senora's class of first graders. During Spanish class, almost every day, I take a group of two first grade students out into a different room and have them read SymTalk sentences from their workbooks out. As they read certain sentences, I record them speaking on the Garageband podcast tool on my laptop. This will be useful for teachers and parents at Old Trail; Old Trail plans on updating its website, and can possibly put these recordings on their website in a section discussing the first grade Spanish curriculum. I'm really excited that my podcasts could possibly help enhance the Old Trail website, and am having a blast with the first graders (I'm pretty sure they're having fun recording themselves speak too!).
I also am still trying to help Senora in any way possible-- from doing errands to making copies of lessons, just to make her job easier! I can say that I'm quite a pro at the copy machine now, and it's gotten to the point where many other teachers will see me in the halls and ask me to do them a few copying favors as well. From time to time I attend class hall meetings (and today was put on the spot to give a speech about my alumni relations with the school!), and school meetings, where yesterday I helped Senora present awards for a Spanish contest that the middle school students recently participated in. During school meetings, I've also gotten to see the middle school play and band concert. Additionally, I've been in touch with Mrs. Vicki Henschen, one of the heads of the alumni office, and have helped correspond with my class about upcoming alumni events at Old Trail.
My wonderful sponsor has also found ways to help me learn some basic conversational Spanish! In the 7th grade class, I'm doing an "oral quiz" activity, in which I take out a group of two students at a time (and end up working with about six students in total per class each day), and I have a list of questions to ask them. They have to respond to the questions, and with the little Spanish that I now know, I judge the quality of their responses to the questions. It's a pass-fail quiz, so basically as long as they understand the question and show effort in answering the questions they pass. I've loved not only learning more conversational Spanish, but also getting to know the 7th graders one on one and learning more about them.
Furthermore, I've been helping out Senora's 7th grade Spanish class with some information on Hugo Chavez. Along with learning Spanish language, the students learn about Hispanic culture, and are currently learning about Venezuela. Senora wanted them to know some information on Hugo Chavez, the leader of Venezuela, so for her class, I researched him and came up with a packet of information on him. In class, the students will read some of the paragraphs I choose out loud, and will write down notes on Chavez. Also, the 7th grade class has recently finished a project on a travel destination in the areas of South America and the Caribbean. They had to use Wikipages to post their information, and needed a lot of help with figuring out how to work with the websites and create their pages. Thankfully, I was able to be a big help to Senora and the 7th graders with their projects! Additionally, Senora likes to implement Spanish songs into her classes-- the kids are really enthusiastic about Spanish music and culture, and learn a lot of vocabulary through the songs. Recently, I've helped her find songs and lyrics from certain artists, such as Shakira and Enrique, and soon she will show them to the class.
And, of course, I've continued to work with my 4th grade friend, Juan Pablo. We're winding down and finishing up recording books, and lately I've been working a lot on editing the recordings and will soon be able to burn the recordings onto CD's. I can't wait to present the CD's to the kindergarten teachers!
