"A good day is apparent in the morning."
This an appropriate phrase, though I would venture to add our attitudes influence whether our day is good or bad.
Today was a good day. I taught my first lesson while here at UWC East Africa. I've been working with two different teachers here - one for primary language support and another for secondary language support. This means I am creating lessons for seven and eight year olds while also accommodating the needs of my fifteen to nineteen year olds.
This is a challenging task to accomplish. It's hard to turn my brain off of the academic language I often use to analyze language and literature in order to break things down. With my younger kiddos I'm focusing on sight words, digraphs, and diphthongs. I only have 40 minutes with the two of them but when they're so young, that's already more than their attention span.
Word Dictation - Every time the students come to us to begin their lesson, we say a sentence so they can work on their listening and transcribing skills. For example, "The dog ran fast" was today's sentence.
Word Hop - I don't know if this is the actual name of the game. I'm sure I'm also not the first person to play it with my students. However, I find this an extremely effective way for students to learn their sight words. I wrote the sight words they need practice with on some pieces of paper about the size of a note card. Then I took them outside of the classroom and laid them on the cement cobble stones running between the two parts of the building. They had to say the full word before they could hop from one word to the next. My students implemented a competition between the two of them so they were trying to hop faster than the other. Ultimately, they had fun and it took up a good chunk of time.
Fill in the Blank - This one was really simple for me to create. I cut strips of printer paper and essentially used the cloze method for ESL/ELL instruction. I had their sight words and had them put the sight words into a sentence to make sure it was contextual.
Number Count - I wrote numbers out on the board, asked them to read the number, and then count that many blocks out.
All of these games kept my two boys engaged with language, using the words over and over and over. Sight words are difficult for younger kids because you can't sound them out. You just have to know them on sight and that involves practicing the words in as many ways as possible.
Working with the younger kids is quite a challenge for me, because I don't like not being 100% prepared. It's ironic because as teachers, we can never ever ever be 100% prepared. Teaching is the unpredictable. However, most of my teaching experience up to this point has predominantly been with middle and high school children in Language Arts. It's tough to bring my vocabulary down for the younger kids and even with all ages of ESL instruction.
I value the opportunity to put myself into uncomfortable teaching positions. Sometimes, I feel so intimidated by the concept of teaching. I'm supposed to have all of this knowledge I use to help my students, but oftentimes I feel like an imposter. I feel like I never know enough or I'll never be able to help enough, and when I'm in the middle of this feeling I have to remind myself that I feel this way because I care. I worry because I care. I spend hours prepping and running through lessons in my asking myself how I can engage the most amount of students. How can I turn learning into a game? How can I make it fun? How can I get my students up, moving, singing, dancing, acting, participating, asking questions?
It's hard to be on top of the game all the time, and it's even harder when your lessons flop. It's hard when you think something will be really fun and engaging only to find out it's only fun and engaging for you. I don't think we can learn if we never have lessons that flop, though. Nobody is perfect and I try to keep that in mind whenever I feel like what I'm doing isn't good enough for my students. At the end of the day all I can do is my best.