Escuelita Maria Auxiliadora

The highlight of my weeks recently has been the Tuesday meeting with the teachers of the Escuelita Maria Auxiliadora. This is the school whose teacher I invited to the Peace Corps Project Management Workshop, and together Profesor Nito and I learned how to plan projects and talked about what kinds of things we could do with the school. When we got back from the conference, we called a meeting with the six teachers of the school (there are 144 students from 54 families in the school) and we brainstormed needs (in Spanish, it’s called a lluvia de ideas, a rain of ideas), and through secret ballot voted to do a project to get new uniforms for the students. I don’t understand it exactly, but it’s something to do with the fact that the kids all have the old school uniforms and now the shirts should be blue instead of white, or something like that. It’s actually fine with me that I don’t understand the project, b-c after all I’m just the facilitator. I really enjoy working with this particular group of teachers, they seem to get along really well and respect each other and have vision and passion for their school (well, one teacher lacks vision and passion but he doesn’t talk much so the rest of us can move forward).

Last week we made a brief Plan of Action, involving that one teacher was going to talk to the woman from the store who was going to talk to the seamstress to make all the uniforms (then the store will sell the uniforms to the parents), and that we’d eventually include the uniform requirement in a set of school rules that had yet to be written. We also informed the parents at a meeting last week that we were working on a project, tho we saved the details for next month’s parents meeting. I keep asking if the parents have money to pay for uniforms, but no one else seems to be worried so I’ll forget about that.
Today the report on the Plan of Action was brief – the material is ordered, the uniforms’ll be ready by the start of the school year in February. Then the teachers jumped on the fact that we still had time to create the school rules, and they wanted to do another lluvia de ideas to think of the kinds of expectations they wanted to put on the teachers, students and parents, respectively. We ran out of time before getting to the parents expectations, and when I suggested we let the parents do that themselves at the next meeting, they were all in agreement that this would help the parents have more involvement and participation. It was pretty fantastic!!

Next week the staff will meet again to develop in detail the school rules – I won’t be able to be there but I think at this point I’d just slow them down (all the important, personal things they say are always in Guarani and need to be translated). Two weeks from today (hoy en quince they say, 15 days from now) I’ll go back, and this time bring my mom, to see the progress they’ve made. I wish it were all this easy!

Working with Matias

A few weeks ago I was bored and went back to my friend Angelica who teaches second grade at the Escuela Virgen del Carmen. She and I had worked together on reading lessons before, and we talked about the new materials and ideas she’s used since. But, she said, there are still some students who don’t get it. I offered to work with those students in a small group, and so my first experience in actually teaching reading began.

Matias is a sweet kid with some sort of learning disability who can name only some of the letters, and I worked the first week with Zoeli, who I think reads just fine, and this week with Agotina, who recognizes some letters but doesn’t read. The big challenge is to get them to stop thinking about the names of the letters, and instead focus on the SOUNDS they make. In English, for example, it’s not “teee” but just “t”. If you try to say “teeee” you’ll end up trying to read the word “tree” like “teee-aarrr-eeeeeee.” Same thing in Spanish, we need to retrain these kids to think in terms of sounds instead of names of letters.

Fortunately, this is what we learned in PC training, and what several of my friends did in the States as teachers, so I had some ideas where to begin. We used a classroom that had the ABCs posted on the wall, along with pictures of things that began with that letter (a pair of Tijeras or scissors was taped to the letter T, for example). Then we sang the letters song “Tijeras, Tijeras, t, t, t” for every letter so that they’d start to get that we were dealing with the initial sounds of these words. Yes, I sang, it was hideous but the kids liked it. Then we moved on to little cards I had made with the letters of the alphabet, and as we each picked one we had to say out loud the sound the letter made (pick a t, say t). This only worked sort of with Matias, who was still stuck on the things from the wall and would say “tijeras” instead. Or he would be excited about the letters whose names he knew and say that instead. Right idea, almost. I gave him a set of alphabet cards to practice at home, and stopped by his mom’s house on the way home to encourage her to practice with him. (Not sure she did tho)

This week I ditched the song and we went right for reviewing the sounds of the letters, and this time I explained a little bit more how we were only thinking about the sounds, not the names or words. Agostina was a much more attentive student than Zoeli had been the week before, so that helped. After we went through all the letters, we played Memory with little cards I borrowed from the Supervision. The pairs each had one letter and one simple drawing of something that began with that letter (b and banana). That was fun and I think helpful. I wish the teachers here saw how much kids can learn through play. Then we read the words that went with the drawings, so they could see the sounds of b a n a n a come from those letters. Finally I pulled out some sight words, basic words like mama, for them to practice sounding out, and while Matias didn’t exactly read one on his own he might have gotten the idea. We’ll see next week.

I didn’t exactly love tutoring, and I’m not sure I’m very good at it, but it’s yet another way I can support the teachers here. When it comes down to it, Angelica has a dozen other kids to worry about and won’t ever take the time to help these kids individually, which is the only way at this point they’re going to learn. Apparently some schools in Paraguay have resource teachers, like in the States, who would go from school to school to provide extra support for kids with learning difficulties. It’s not impossible for Tacuati to have one next year, but it’s pretty unlikely.