We’ve reached the halfway point of our 11
weeks of training. I realized I haven’t
posted in awhile, sorry!
After the third week of training ended, my
group stopped having Spanish classes.
Since we are the advanced group, they only give us three weeks of
class. After that, we have to fill up
our schedules with other activities and study on our own. This frees up a Spanish teacher to work with
some of the lower groups who need more help improving their Spanish level. So, what do I do now? It’s been weird not having class, but we’ve been
doing a good job staying busy.
We’re required to teach one class per week in
the elementary school. Since I like to
teach and have tons of time now that there’s no Spanish class, I’ve been
teaching two days per week, on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. It’s a sixth grade class of about 25
students, and the teacher is younger and really receptive to the kinds of
activities that I’m doing. Once we get
to our sites, we’ll be co-planning and co-teaching, but right now I’m just
teaching science on my own. The teacher
stays in the room with me and helps me out with explaining difficult concepts
and classroom management. The kids are
always excited to do “dinámicas,” which are games and activities that get them
up and moving. I try to include at least
one in each class so that they have a little motivation and can get up and move
around. I’ve taught 5 classes. So far I’ve taught about renewable and
non-renewable energy, potential/kinetic/mechanical energy, ways to save
electricity/avoid accidents with electricity, and the nitrogen and water cycles. I’ve had to do a lot of work brushing up on
my science knowledge and reviewing the vocabulary, but everything’s going
pretty well. By the end of training I’ll
have spent a lot of time in the classroom and should be more than ready to
start working in schools once I get to my site.
We’ve also been working with the “Club de
Lectores” (Reader’s Club) at the library, which is a group of about 15
elementary school-aged kids. There is a
story and drawing contest that is going on now, and the theme is “Salvando el
Medio Ambiente” (Saving the Environment).
We’ve been reading environment-themed books to the kids and helping them
work on their stories. Before I left the
states, I bought “El Lórax” to bring with me here. It was a struggle to read it with all of the
crazy words and rhyming (it’s hard to read in English, and 10 times harder in
Spanish!), but the kids loved it. This
week we read a book that was about things that kids can do to help the
environment and then we went out to the park and collected garbage. In a matter of 6 or 7 minutes, we collected 2
huge sacks full of garbage. We saved the
plastic bottles and we are going to use them to make crafts. So far, the kids made maracas and we used
some of them for bowling pins (with a coconut as a bowling ball!). We plan on cutting the tops off the bottles
and planting seeds with the kids to use up the rest of the bottles.
Last week, I went on my volunteer
visit. The point of the volunteer visit
is to send us out on our own to navigate the public transportation and visit a
new place in Nicaragua to live with a volunteer for a few days. By living with a volunteer, we get a chance
to ask a million questions about their lives and their work and get to
participate in their activities and programs at their site. Susana and I went to the department of
Matagalpa for our visit. We hung out
with the environment volunteer that lives there and went to the rural school
where he works, checked out the gardens that he’s made, helped build a stove
for a family, and worked in his neighbor’s garden. It was definitely a hands-on experience, and
we got a chance to participate in his activities. Some of the highlights for me were going to the
rural school where he works and building the stove. The school only had 2 classrooms, both with
multi-grade classes. The one that the
volunteer works with is grades 3-6, which are the grades that environment
volunteers work with (the younger kids don’t have science in their curriculum). There were probably about 6 kids in each
grade, and it was cool to see the volunteer and teacher work together to teach
kids of all different levels at the same time.
The other cool thing we did was work on the stove project. It’s a country-wide project to build improved
wood stoves that families use to cook their food. Volunteers write grants and receive money to
build the stoves. It is an improved
model that uses less wood and has a chimney to prevent the family from inhaling
lots of smoke while they’re cooking. The
stoves are made out of brick and a mixture of mud, horse poo, small pieces of
dry grass, and water combined with crushed up aloe plants. All of the stuff gets mixed up and used like
cement. It was a really cool project,
and Susana and I learned a lot. I’m not
sure if it’s something I’ll do in my site when I’m a volunteer, but who knows!
I guess that’s a pretty good update for
now. Some other highlights:
- I’ve been going to the gym with my host sisters…quite the experience (I’ll try to write a post about it soon)
- I went to Jinotepe (the city where my host sisters go to college) to go out for pizza for their birthday.
- We went out to the club in Masaya with Susana’s host brother, Fran.
- I went on a hike with my friend Luis down to the Laguna de Apoyo. It was a super difficult hike, especially on the way back up, but we rocked it. We went swimming in the laguna when we got down there, and it was absolutely beautiful.
- Our garden is growing! Well, some of it. A couple of squashes, all of our radishes, and the tomatoes in our seed bed are doing well. We only ended up with one cucumber plant, so thats kind of sad.
Also- we’ll be finding out our sites on
Thursday, the 25th. They’re
really keeping us in the dark and not even giving us a list of the sites where
they’re sending us. I’ll make sure to
post when I find out where I’ll be living for the next 2 years!
Sorry for the lack of communication, but I
promise I’m doing fine!
Hasta luego!
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