Since I am most comfortable with the math curriculum I decided that I would take that over first. Tuesday I arrived to the school, after dropping off my laundry at the laundry mat for the first time, and was yet again bombarded by several of my children at once giving me hugs and trying to give me things. They continuously ask me if I am “coming back” at the end of the day and at lunch, I think they are afraid that I am just going to disappear! They don’t quite understand that I will be here for 4 weeks! They are so cute. Here they call me Miss Michelle while back at Codington I was called Ms. Vollman. I am pretty sure all the teachers are called by their first name. However, the students rarely ever call their teachers by their formal name, they say “teacher teacher”. Oh if I had a Belizean dollar for every time they said “teacher teacher”, oh I would have a lot of Belizean dollars! I observed again during language and grammar and helped check their work for Mr. Burnel. Then they had their break during which time I got my picture taken with the rest of the interns at RC by the Ambergris Today newspaper reporter.
After break I began to teach my first math lesson which were word problems dealing with the subtraction of money. About five minutes into the lesson my teacher’s friend from Kansas and his girlfriend showed up. They were visiting in Belize and brought a whole bunch of school supplies to give to his students. They brought pencils that looked like it had money wrapped around it (because the guy was a banker), pencil grips and mechanical pencils. They were taking pictures and talking to the kids and of course the kids were all out of their seats hugging and switching pencils and colored grippers. Do you think that they paid even one once of attention to their math lesson after they just had Christmas morning in March? Nope, not a chance. I was a little frustrated by the whole situation. It was my first lesson and it was completely interrupted. I should be used to it though, people are all the time dropping by the school and in the classroom wanting to just “take a look” or give stuff to the class. A woman from Canada came yesterday and read them a story about snowmen for 30 minutes. It’s very much whatever goes here. My teacher later in the day said that I did a good job teaching the lesson but I wasn’t really sure what I did a good job doing … He seems very confident in me and is letting me “call the shots” which I am kind of glad that he is letting me do what I feel most comfortable doing.
Wednesday I decided to continue teaching math to the students but I also decided with Mr. Burnel that I would take on some of the morning Language arts and work with their spelling words with them. Tuesday I created sentences in which they had to fill in the blanks with their spelling words. The kids had fun with it and they were MUCH better behaved for me than the day before. I think it was just a lot of excitement with a new teacher in the classroom but now they are settling back down and I feel like this is much more manageable. I talked with my teacher and he has given me ways to keep them in line. Those who misbehave have to stay after class and sweep the classroom or go outside and pick up ten pieces of trash. Stickers are a huge reward. Sometimes we do “boys vs. girls” to see who can finish their work first and they get points. Whichever team has the most points at the end of the day gets to leave to go home first. Mr. Burnel and I team taught the math lesson because they were beginning to learn about subtraction with regrouping and that is a very hard concept for most students to learn. Surprisingly, all my students caught on fairly quickly and it was a fantastic lesson. For the first time I allowed students to come to the board to work out problems, they were beyond excited! I don’t think that they get that opportunity very often so when they did they were all very eager to be the one to get it right so they could come up. I think I will use that to my advantage during the next few weeks.
I have a little boy name Issac who has some sort of learning disability. He is has speech problems and he doesn’t form complete sentences and speaks very quietly. He does not get along with very well socially with other students either. He is not included in group of boys that plays during break and lunch. He gets picked on a lot however I have noticed that he often times instigates it. During class however he does absolutely nothing. He either wanders around the classroom or goes outside. He does not to any of the work and is not really required to. He cannot write or form letters or identify letters or numbers. It is hard because there is not a special education teacher to work with kids like Issac. Ms. Kate who is a woman who helps out in the mornings in Mr. Burnel’s class bought Issac an alphabet puzzle for him to learn his letters. Unfortunately he cannot just sit there on his own and learn them, he needs someone constantly sitting there repeating the letters over and over and over. I want to help him and try to make a difference but I don’t know how much difference I can do in 4 weeks. My goal for the end of my time here is for him to at least know the entire alphabet.
Also, there are no P.E. teachers at the school. Whatever the kids do for P.E. is up to the discretion of the individual teacher. P.E. takes place in the middle courtyard of the school. Some teachers have the students to calisthenics such as jumping jacks and other little exercises. Some teachers have the kids play games such as tag or kickball. Other teachers take the kids to the “sports arena” that is in the back of the school courtyard. It is a cement court that looks like a basketball court except there are built in soccer goals at each end. Many teachers take their kids there and let boys play on teams vs. each other and then girls have teams that vs. each other. The rest of the kids just watch from the bleachers or rather just run around.
Also, I went to the "school library" for the first time today. It is pretty much the size of my living room in the Seahawk Landing and has 4 book shelves. There is not even enough room for my whole class to sit down at tables in the room, some of them have to sit on the floor to read. It is kind of upsetting too because many of them do not know how to read the books they pick out. They simply just look at the pictures and then move onto another book. I sat with one little boy today as he struggled through a book. I helped him sound out all the words, he was determined to read them all. There were so many other students who wanted me to sit with them and read with them also but I'm only one person. So many children here crave the one-on-one attention that they all need and deserve.
So now I am going to begin answering my questions that my kids from Codington wrote for me before I left for Belize J
Jaz, Hayden, Brody, Eli – you asked “what grade are you teaching”? I am teaching Infant II which is the same as Second grade in America! They are learning many of the same things that I taught you. Remember when we learned about regrouping in math? I just taught my students here how to do that on Wednesday!
Jaz, Madison, Ben – you asked “how many students are in one class”? In the classroom I am teaching in there a lot of students. I have 30 students in my class. MATH PROBLEM: How many more kids do I have in my class in Belize than you have in your class at Codington? J But some schools have smaller class sizes. Six of my friends that are teaching at another school have an average of 13 students in their class, a much smaller class size!
Jackson, Ben and Ryan – you asked “how long do they stay in school”? School starts here at 8:30, a little later than at Codington. It is a little different though because at 2:30 Infant I and Infant II classes get out at 2:30, just like Codington, but all the other classes have to stay in school until 3:30! MATH PROBLEM: If they go to school from 8:30 until 2:30, how many hours are they at school? We have one break during the day, kind of like “snack time” that you have in the morning and for lunch we have an hour and a half! That is because a lot of students go home to eat lunch; students do not bring their lunch to school. Can you imagine if your parents came and picked you up every day for lunch?
Jimmy and Cooper – you asked “what do the floors in your classroom look like”? We do not have carpet floors or even tiled floors, our floors are made of cement, like the sidewalks outside. They are very hard and it is very dirty and covered in dirt and pencil shavings all the time. We do not have someone that comes in everyday to vacuum our classroom; students have to stay after school to sweep!
Angel – you asked “is there a bunch of fish”? YES there are SO many fish. I jumped off a pier to go snorkeling and when I jumped in I saw hundreds of fish!! I have also been snorkeling out on a boat and I’ve never seen so many fish before. There are colorful ones, plain ones, big ones, small ones … I have an underwater camera and I will take some pictures of them and bring them back to show you J
That’s all the questions I will answer for now – I will answer more in my next blog, I promise! Miss you all at Codington. Greetings from Belize J
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