Teaching | Joel

While we were in the Dominican Republic, we taught at a lot of different places. Espranza, Nueva Creacion, Haina, and the school at Monica and Mateo's. To be honest, going into the trip I didn't think I would like teaching at all. I just felt like the kids wouldn't listen and would just want to run around the classroom going crazy. I thought they were going to be out of control. I guess it was a little bit right but not totally. Teaching was amazing! When you look into the classrooms, the kids are all sitting down and quiet. Walking into the room, you'd see the kids looking up at you and they'd greet you all together. As soon as we start to write stuff down on the board, the kids would immediately take out their books and copy down notes. What we taught all depended on the age of the kids we were teaching. We would teach kids that were anywhere from 4-17 years old. With the younger kids, we would do some basic English like letters and numbers. That isn't enough material to last through a full class so we usually ended up colouring or playing games with the kids before the class finished. With some of the middle aged students, we would do a quick review of numbers and letters, but soon after we would move on to vocabulary. Mostly just like foods, animals, shapes, and some random objects. But both the middle aged children and the very young children have something in common; they both like chico chica. Chico chica is a game when you separate the chicos (boys) and chicas (girls) in two teams. One chico and one chica come up to the front. We then call out a number or letter in English and they have to race to write down the correct answer. The kids love this game and ask to play the game often. The older kids are different to teach than the younger kids. They know letters and numbers well so there isn't really even a point of reviewing it. Sounds, proper sentences, and more difficult vocab were often used with the older children. They are smart and can understand what we're teaching them but they don't really like learning about that stuff. In my experience, they would much rather talk about famous singers and actors and about which boys and girls that they like. It was still very fun talking with them about that kind of stuff. I'm glad that I got the experience to teach there. It was really cool connecting with the kids because it was obvious that they enjoyed you being there and were interested in listening to what you had to say. Teaching was one of my favourite parts of the trip.