The Beginning of Self-Directed Projects

All 15 of us trainees are required to complete self-directed projects during this second half of training.  These projects are for our benefit, to gain experience working with Honduras youth, parents, and teachers.  There are 5 different locations so we are in groups of 3 at each location.  One is an orphanage in the next town over and the rest are schools.  Emily, Michelle, and I are working at the school right in our town, so we can walk there whenever we need.  The school year in Honduras is from February to November and the students go to school from 7am-1pm each day.  We only have nine afternoons allotted to self-directed projects, entonces these will not be sustainable projects for the most part.  The three of us decided that we would like to work with special education students since they receive no individual attention of any kind. 

This afternoon was dedicated to meeting the students and hopefully assessing their needs.  We were able to speak with the school director yesterday (and in the process we got left behind at the school while the rest of our entire training group drove to a different town) and we told him our game plan.  Luckily, the director was very willing to work with us and ask the teachers about their students with the greatest needs.  When we arrived at the school today, there was a list of 26 students grades 1 through 6 with descriptions of what the need.  We had an hour to cement our preparation because the students eat lunch from 1 to 2, and then 17 students showed up in all.  We had a successful afternoon with them, going over the alphabet, singing some sings, doing a read-aloud, and working with vowels.  We had a few games and dinamicas planned to help break the ice and keep the students interested. 

I learned a lot from this afternoon.  The students were more cooperative than I expected, although one 15 year old boy who is in third grade brought in a giant water gun and was squirting it at a little girl in the class.  Other than that, the time went fairly smoothly.  Personally, I need to learn a lot more Spanish before I will be comfortable teaching alone.  The three of us work very well together, but next time we will split into two groups.  Both Emily and Michelle are fluent in Spanish, so Michelle will take smaller group of the fourth through sixth graders and Emily and I will teach a larger group of first through third graders until I am more comfortable on my own and we can have three separate groups.  I am very lucky to have such accommodating partners!  Those girls are my best friends here and it is even better that we are all in the same location for our projects!  Working together, these few short weeks should be as successful as possible!