Tia Petunia and God

     So my English classes and reading clubs are going along slowly but surely, with English clearly being the most preferred of the two subjects, since everyone thinks it's "so cool" to learn English (definitely in contrast with the general attitude toward learning foreign languages in the U.S.). Also, several mothers have pushed the classes on their kids, and so at the last meeting there were 27 students, in contrast to the 7 who showed up for the first class a few weeks ago. "Guate time", aka the cultural habit of arriving minutes or even hours late to a scheduled activity, does not apply to these classes - as I was getting ready to leave my house the other day, a student showed up at my door and informed me that everyone was waiting for me, and indeed, when I arrived at the school (5 minutes early!) there were at least 15 kids waiting for classes to begin.
     At the last meeting there were also several kids that weren't old enough to be able to read or write, so I am trying even harder now to keep the focus on verbal learning, having them repeat things I say or name things they see, for example different colors of construction paper. I am also trying to change activities about every 10 minutes in an attempt to keep their attention. This week I also showed a video about colors in class, which was a video intended for little American kids who are just learning to talk, but my kids seemed to like it. I figured that in Youth Development we always preach about using different teaching methods and media to accommodate different learning styles, so I might as well listen to my own advice, hence the video. Turns out that kids aren't the only ones interested in English - during several classes, we have been graced by the presence of a dog or two, who generally just wander in and plop down on the floor for a long nap.
     If it hasn't already been obvious, the place where my heart really is over this "summer" break is with my reading groups. I was nervous about getting them together - worried that kids wouldn't show up and if they did that they would be bored and wouldn't keep showing up, but I finally have all three groups together (the last one just started last week because their school year ends later) and although attendance is a bit lower than I hoped for (I was shooting for 10-15 kids in each group but there are only 3-6 in each) the kids that do show up seem interested and motivated, which makes for a good group dynamic and makes me happy. We start our meetings with a vocab test, which at first I was doing individually and verbally but now have switched to a written test to save time, and for every word that a student gets right, they win a point on a prize chart. Then we might do another activity (a wordfind, some other game) or we might go straight to reading, everyone taking turns reading about a page out loud. Since the names of characters and places aren't changed into Spanish, and since they are often weird names to begin with, the kids often have trouble with figuring out how to pronounce them; "Dumbledore" becomes "Doombleydoori", and McGonagall is just skipped over all together. After about a 1/2 hour of reading I assign a chapter or two for homework. THEN comes the fun part - the real reason why these kids keep coming back to me (and it's not even the prizes from the point chart). I've come to realize that these kids probably don't actually think of these clubs as reading clubs, but rather as coloring clubs. Every meeting I bring coloring pages (printed from the internet) of something that happened in the chapter that we are reading: Hagrid on a motorcycle, Dumbledore, an owl carrying a letter, Harry buying a wand. The volunteer that was here before me left me awesome coloring supplies, so every week after our reading time, we pull our desks a little closer and I pull out the boxes of 96 crayons and 64 markers and we get to work. Until the kids figured out that this was going to be a weekly thing, some used to tell me that their moms told them they had to be home right about the time when we were going to start reading. But lo and behold, when I told them there would be coloring after reading, their moms suddenly didn't want them home anymore.
     This isn't to say that they don't like reading - they all do the reading homework that I assign them, and some even asked me for additional homework because they were bored and had nothing to do at home. So last week I gave a homework assignment to one of my groups - "choose a character from the book and describe how they are physically and their personality". The first girl wrote about Harry Potter, starting with an accurate summary of his mental and physical characteristics, and then branching out (to be able to fill the whole page per my requirement, I suspect) to describe his eyelashes, fingernails, and knees, which are long, oval, and round, respectively. The second girl who did the assignment chose to write about Aunt (Tia) Petunia. Her description went something like this: "Tia Petunia used to be nice in the past and now she still is nice. She is tall and blonde. Tia Petunia is a nice woman who loves God. God is the creator of all things and he makes miracles. God is great. Everything is possible through God. Thank you God." I didn't have the courage and couldn't think of the words to politely explain to this girl that while I'm glad she did the assignment, nowhere in the book was God ever mentioned and furthermore Tia Petunia is not even a little bit nice, so three points went onto her point chart and we continued with the reading. Oh, Guatemala.

Yay coloring!

Rule number one of being in a Guatemalan picture - do NOT smile!