my classes at El Escorical. How I do it.

Oye!

Without any idea of who I am writing too, (only the expectation of Karie, CJR, and maybe an older self to read my impresonante life postings) I will commence to tell you the gory details of my great awesome past two weeks, here in the central zones of Espana.
So anyway, as you know I have been teaching at a summer camp at El Escorial. I started about the first week of July and the 25th will be my last day. (!) But it has been an experience that I have thoroughly enjoyed. I never thought I could pull it off as a school teacher (and trust me, it is more of my life goal to NOT do so) but I think that with the lack of materials and experience I had, I have done a pretty BANGING job. I try to do things a little differently in my classroom than the other teachers.
1. I don't talk down to my kids.
2. I give them responsibilities.
3. I give high points to innovation and creativity. One day I had to go down stairs to get the notebooks I had forgotten, so I put a writing prompt on the board to keep them occupied for awhile. The question was "Who am I." Maybe I little to deep for eleven year olds, but I had high hopes. When I came back, my face fell to see that each student had responded in exactly the same, identical format. "I am ....name..." I stood and I looked at them in shock. "Kids, what is this! What are you doing? Do you see something wrong with these responses?!" We went on to have a lengthy discussion about boring and creative. Imagine you live on a street and every house is exactly the same. The roof, the walls, the yard, the color. All all the same. Now, imagine that you live on a street where each house and yard is completely different. You have one neighbor living in a shoe, the next a rocket ship. The colors, the swimming pools, the slip-in-slides. Each house is uniquely built with its structure, colors, and theme structured to the personality of the owner. Now look at yourselves. Are you all the same with the same likes, tastes, looks, wants, dreams? No. I want you to look at yourself and pull out those great individual qualities that make you different than the rest of the world. We did the exercise again, and I was happy with the results. Ruben described himself as an animal with the capabilities of an extraterrestrial. Javier can fly faster than a bird. Andrea has 52 t-shirts. Marina will become the most famous basketball player. Hopefully at least I can teach these kids to move outside of the box with the English language. It is not only, "Is this a cat?" "No, it's not a cat. It's a dog" They have been trained like robots, to regooberate mechanically the words they see on the board without putting meaning behind them. And since this is a summer camp, and we teachers have been told by our boss to flee from grammar lessons like the plague, I feel that improving their writing comfortability will be the best thing for them right now.
4. I thrive on improvisation. I think my best lessons come when I enter the class room with nothing more than a piece of chalk in my hand. I always plan a basic layout of day objectives, and activities we are going to do for the day. but I let these curve and bend to the moment of actualization.
5. Routine/structure.
Yes, I love my improv but I still maintain a strict routine within the classroom. You always need to have the kids looking forward to something, they need to know the schedule of the day, that there is always something more coming - it prevents lulls in the lesson and clock watching. I try to never end the class with the 'game.' And I never call it 'games' either. Kids don't like 'games.' Kids like not doing anything structured until the bell rings to leave. I don't let them play games, we do activities or exercises.
On the first day we set up our daily structure. First we elected the President, Vice President, and Secretary. Then we began to form and create our class identity. (did I tell you about our class ignition process? lol, again hats off to the improv - best lesson ever) We had chosen the name of our class first, Susie's Champions Class. What does our class identity need students? And then it was decided: flag, official colors, matching uniforms, a motto, a password, a pledge, class rules, musical anthem, nicknames, mascot, slogan. The Presidency was in charge of handing out assignments. They got to work quick as a class, the color group working with the flag and uniform representatives to collaborate on the official spiritwear. The pledge, anthem, and motto trying to pullout paralleled themes.
We also layed out our weekly calender, with important events to look forward to, the program on the last night that we will need to prepare for.
I made a daily assignment chart with jobs such as chalk-board eraser, pledge leader, seat-assigner, Daily class summary writer (yes, I gave one of my jobs to a student - best move ever - but they take this job seriously and it helps them practice the past tense), flag-poster and photographer. Ana, the secretary, assigns the positions at the end of class for the following day.
Before we enter the classroom, I make them line up by the door and they must tell me the password before they are allowed to enter. We say our class pledge every morning, and I make them put their hands over their hearts while the flag poster carries and posts the flag on the door. Before we leave at the end of the day, we go over the schedule for tomorrow, then we gather around the door and chant our motto.
like I said, its all about the structure.

Monday is the Birthday of Rachel, I think we will have a birthday party. I will bring in 'Cake,' 'Balloons.' 'Decorations' we will sing 'Happy Birthday' and maybe open 'Presents.'