Service Learning Visit #2

Today, I went to a charter school called El Sol for my second teaching experience through service learning. It was a very interesting experience to say the least. When we got there, I led an exercise similar to the introductory one we did last visit, but this time it went along with the theme of family. In this exercise we got the kids to talk about traits that their parents or siblings have. It was good to see some people come out of their shells and talk a bit about something we haven't really touched upon thus far. We then got on to going over some of the answers from the questionnaire, and rewriting a questionnaire in one student's case. After that, we got to writing the paragraph about family. This was a very big challenge because it is not necessarily the most entertaining thing for the students. Because they were not entertained with the assignment, the students decided to pick on me instead of actually writing. While I try to work on the paragraph with each child individually, the other two would be distracted because they were too busy picking on me too actually get work done. After many, "Get back to work"'s, they finally finished writing the paragraph. As a group, we managed to get through the rest of the activities we planned quite easily which could be considered a victory, but personally, I don't think the kids really got the complete message from the lesson plan today. Next time, I am going to try to utilize my partner more, because they tend to listen to her more than they do to me. If we can manage to keep the kids focused and on task, we could really make an impact on the kids' view on English, and the themes that we teach.