Everyday it Gets Easier to Work With our Students

Team Journal for Thursday November 19, 2015

Message of the day:

“Flowers only bloom when they are ready.  People are the same way.  You cannot rush or force they open just because you think it’s time.  Be patient.” – Timber Hawkeye

Volunteer Richard leads Simon Says game

Everyday it seems to get easier to work with our students as we get to know each other better.  It’s beginning to appear unfortunate that our time together is getting very short.  I have had easy time communicating was almost all of my students since they are good at carrying on English conversations.  There are certainly words that they could learn and they could work on pronunciation but overall they definitely have a grasp on the language.

Today we practiced with sounds that are similar in English. We worked on the words such as peels and pills.  I don’t think they minded this exercise but I felt it worked better in the morning than later in the afternoon.  If it is a more energetic game such as hitting the word with a fly swatter than it worked better later.  Otherwise our class begins to fall asleep.

An enjoyable lunch with our students

We played “Simon says” which was a lot of fun because our students suffer from being a little competitive so this was a very spirited game. We tried our luck at playing another game by giving word clues to get a person to come up with the category.  It didn’t work as well but I think that was because we didn’t get the rules across to our students.  They tried to act out the clues as opposed giving just words.

Fly Swatter game is fun!

Definitely the highlight of the day was going on a fabulous lunch trip to a 100 year old house in town. The lunch was huge and the food was great – I believe someone said that there were 17 various dishes – each better than the last!

After lunch our students broke into songs and dancing which was also very fun.  I believe that they are much less reserved than Americans would be in a similar situation.  Our students are around 30 years old but they have kept much more of the youthful spirit than Americans do.  Americans seems to act older faster which is unfortunate and definitely something we could learn from this culture.

Submitted by Richard