Today was my first day teaching alone at Baixa d’Alegria, the community center. The students had a long weekend, and only three students came to class today. I had planned on doing the family photo Show and Tell, which I spent Friday’s class preparing them for, but no one brought in their family photos, so I had to come up with a new lesson plan that would kill three hours.
First, I reviewed the verbs “to be” and “to have” and wrote sample sentences on the board, asking them to fill in the blank with the correct form (such as “She is lucky. She has a new car.”) They did well with that, so I moved on to weather, which is a new topic for them. We talked about all types of weather as well as seasons of the year. I asked them about the weather throughout the year in Salvador and explained how the weather changes each season in New York.
After that, I resorted to handing out my extra copies of the Food & Kitchen test that I gave to my class at Somando yesterday. I asked them to try it on their own for a little while, then we would review it together. I wrote everything on the board and checked for understanding and pronunciation. Sometimes, I even asked them questions about the food items, like “What is your favorite kind of juice?” I figure that even things like that can help them pick up English and figure out how to form questions and sentences correctly. Evony (the Evangelical missionary) told me that he likes all types of juice, but later, he raised his hand and informed me that he does not like beer.
At the end of class, I asked them if they had any questions. Evony had a list of words that he wanted to know how to say- land, earth, sky, and so on. I began to see a pattern and realized that he was looking to learn vocabulary words that were Biblically relative. Ironically, Evony is probably the only student who I wouldn’t even bet would be able to count to ten. And today, when we talked about weather, I asked them to fill in the blanks to make a sentence like, “During the [season], it is [weather].” For example, “During the spring, it is rainy.” Evony chose not to choose a word or phrase from my list and instead tried to get fancy and say, “During the spring, it is flowers.” I told him no.
All in all, it went fairly well. My Portuguese is actually improving a lot- my students even commented on that. (I think I’ve learned a lot more Portuguese than any of my students have learned English- haha.) Hopefully next time more people will come and bring their family photos!
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