First Week of School

WARNING: This can be boring if you don't really care how the school works!

The first week of school was exciting and overwhelming! Things are very different here than I had imagined; they are very complicated! Because I am working with children 5 to 6 years old, two-thirds of their day is in English and one-third is in Spanish. I am working with the English teacher, Marissa. We see two different sets of kids, Group A and Group B. There are 26 kids in each group/class. There is another English teacher as well, named Rosemary, who works in another classroom. We see each group of kids for a part of the day. During the English part of the day, most of the curriculum is focused on learning and practicing the English language. However, it’s not quite the same as the English we use at home; it’s English from England. They use words like “trainers” to mean “tennis shoes” and “jumper” to mean “shirt.” The curriculum for the English part of the day is set by the school. Each week has a set theme and everything is already planned in advance, including what books to read, what songs to sing, and what English words and phrases to focus on learning that week.

A typical day goes something like this: At 9:30, all 52 children are waiting in the assembly hall. The day starts out there where both Rosemary and Marissa have the children sing songs in English. After a few songs, the children split into Group A and Group B. Group B goes with Marissa and I to our classroom, Group A goes with Rosemary to a classroom. From about 9:45 to 10:45, both Marissa and Rosemary do the same thing with each group of kids, all in English. The children sit on the floor in three rows facing the teacher at the front of the room. They are expected to sit very still and listen. Marissa and Rosemary speak to the children in English although the children are not required to respond in English unless directly asked to. We start out with calendar and the weather, which consists mostly of memorized songs. Marissa reads a few math stories, then does math flashcards with the children in which she shows each child a different number that they have to identify in English. This activity allows her to assess the children individually on how the children are learning to recognize the numbers and say them in English. They do a math song, which is using interactive. Throughout the year, Marissa rereads stories to the children over and over again so that they memorize them. After the math song, Marissa calls on two children to come up to the front of the class and recite one of the stories that they have learned while following along with the book. This allows Marissa to evaluate the children individually on there emerging abilities to speak English as well. The children don’t actually learn to read in English until a few years later. After that, the children are given a short math worksheet to do with adding and subtracting. The children are very good at doing single digit subtraction and addition (they say “take-away” and “plus”). From 10:45 to 11:15, the children go to recess. At 11:15, Group B goes to the Spanish part of the day with Jose, where they learn to read and write in Spanish. Group A comes to Marissa’s class. From 11:15 to 12:30, the children again sit on the floor in three rows and are expected to listen. Marissa reads the children 4 to 5 books that are related to that week’s themed curriculum. She then rereads the story that the children have been working to learn, The 3 Billy Goats Gruff. The children are exceptional at reciting it! They then sing songs that are related to the themed curriculum. They also go over more flashcards that focus on that week’s theme; the children are expected to identify the picture on the flashcard in English. After that they work on their “papers,” which this week were coloring worksheets of the characters and scenes from The 3 Billy Goats Gruff that they will use to retell the story. From 12:30 to 2:30, the children go to lunch and then to extracurricular activities, which include Basque, French, Ballet and Music. At 2:30, Group B comes back to Marissa’s class and Group A then goes to Spanish. From 2:30 to 4:30, our group of children do different things each day, all in English. One day they had Gym, one day they watched a video, one day we went on a walk, one day they did phonological awareness, and one day they did painting. Each day, the activity lasted for about an hour and the other hour was spent reading the stories, singing the songs, and working on The 3 Billy Goats Gruff papers that the other group of children did earlier that day. At 4:30, the children go home. Many of the days vary but for the most part, this was what happens during the day! I guess that from September to February, the schedule is flopped for the two groups of children (Group A starts out with Marissa, etc) and then from March until June the two groups of children switch to this schedule.

The week has been confusing. For the most part, the children are not required to respond in English unless asked. And the children do not understand English that well. I’m not exactly sure what my roll will be in the class. During the math papers, Marissa had me work with a small group of children on their papers. Because we are in the English part of the day, we are only aloud to speak English to the children, although the children don’t understand us all that well! It was so difficult to explain to the children how to add and subtract when they only understood a very limited portion of what I was saying and I only understood a very limited portion of what they were saying! I had to use a lot of nonverbal gestures and repeating of simple phrases! And I’m still not sure if they got it! Also, Marissa asked me if I’d like to teach the children a song. Not thinking about it, I picked a song about an alligator and 3 monkeys swinging in a tree that had a lot of fun hand motions. In the song, the alligator “snaps” up two monkeys, eating them and one monkey gets away. The children thought the song was fun and enjoyed singing it but when Marissa asked them if they new what an alligator was, or what “snap” meant, or what happened to the two monkeys, and what happened to the one monkey who got away, they had NO CLUE what ANY of it was! To add to it, I speak totally different than Marissa does! Her first language is Spanish and she learned English in England as an adult. Marissa and I communicate to each other okay; there are a lot of things that I have to rephrase in order for her to understand. And the way they teach the children is VERY different. The children are expected to sit for very long periods of time and listen. A small portion of the activities are focused whole group, but the actual practice speaking English is all individual, leaving one child doing something while the other 25 have to sit quietly and wait! During the other part of my student teaching, we learned all of these different engagement strategies to engage ALL of the students; that is not the case here. And the phonological awareness is bizarre! The children don’t learn the ABC alphabet; they learn sounds. For example, they do not know what a “Y” is or a “N” by name, they identify the letter “y” as the “ee” sound and the letter “N” as the “nu” sound! They had to find pictures that ended in “ee”, like floppy or puppy, and match them with the “Y” and pictures that end in “nu”, like train and garden, and match them with the “N”. I was super confused!

I want to see what the children do in the Spanish part of the day. Rosemary told me the children learn to read in Spanish using a global method, not phonologically. For the most part, the children can all read in Spanish. They learn to write Spanish in cursive. It’s all so different!! I’m hoping that now that the first week is done that I will find my roll in the class. The kids do seem to like me though!