Ecuador Fun

Recently three student teachers from Kentucky joined the Lower School Kinder team! It is nice to have other people join in the experience. I have planned a trip to Baños with them after having such a successful day out in Quito with my assistant teacher and the Kentucky girls!

Quito was amazing! We got to tour the president’s palace, see El Panecillo, and tour many churchs and museums! Lo, the assistant teacher, even got a reservation to a restaurant that over looks the city of Quito from a high hill… It was breath taking!

It is so funny that we are almost a month into this trip. It feels so different all the time but also so comfortable. The school is obviously completely different as it is teaching English as a second language but at the same time these kinder students are learning the same things they’d learn in kindergarten in the States. A huge part of my day is just getting down the routine and instilling the values that school expects students to carry on with through 12th grade and beyond.

Even my day to day outside of the school feels very normal. When I am not heading on a new adventuring, I walk all over Cumbaya. I found the entrance to the reservior finally and took a relaxing and scenic walk around it. I stop into little cafes and shops just to look at everything. I feel some future student teachers may shy away from Ecuador because of the language barrier but what I have found is that it is really easy to communicate here. The people of Ecuador, and Colegio Menor in particular, are so genuinely helpful and friendly. I am truly enjoying my time here and can’t wait for my next month of adventures! 🙂

The Big Wind Down

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Starting to think about the end of this inspiring and enriching 8 week experience.  Over the next week I am hosting a two class Math Olympics.  What a great “formative assessment!”  90 minutes of class vs. class and student vs. student math frenzies and lollipop prizes.  The students are also bringing in their “science projects” capping out several weeks of study of Mixtures and Solutions.  Three minutes each to present their crazy experiments.  Should be a fun three hours.

As much as we will miss the balmy equatorial climate we are looking forward to getting out the snow shovels and having fun at sea-level in the New England winter.

Of course, having a family Christmas on a Pacific beach is not to be sneezed at either.

 

Teaching at the Leighton Academy

We visited Jessica, Brittany and Janelle before Thanksgiving at their school, the Leighton Academy.  We observed excellent teaching from each of the three ladies.  Janelle taught a small group lesson on persuasive speech … intoducing the lesson asking the students to tell why ‘they should not have homework’;  Jessica, teaching 4 year olds, did a writing exercise with her small group; and Brittany taught the entire class about adjectives (great ‘owl video’ using the ‘smart interactive board’.)

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