Significant+Moments

Significant Moments at Yates Saturday School:

November 2- Yates cancelled Saturday School because of a special holiday in the Burmese community.

November 9- My first day that I could go help at Saturday school. I was placed in a high school classroom (much to my surprise), and I was a little nervous about working with this age. However, once I met the teacher I was calmed down a little bit. I found out that there was supposed to be two teachers in this class, but one of them had quit just before this Saturday. There was also a new principal of Saturday School this week. The plan for the day was to practice summarizing an article and to help edit a book that OPS is publishing in the students' native language. The article for summarizing came from a National Geographic magazine, it was about caves. The teacher taught the kids how to make a chart using the 5 Ws (and how) to get the main ideas of the article. She had students read out loud and then tell her the main points to put in each category. Then we split into small groups and finished the reading and each student wrote a summary. The two students I worked with were on complete opposite ends of their English proficiency. One student read, spoke, and summarized very well, while the other barely understood what the instructions were. This was difficult for me because I had to spend a lot more time making sure he understood what he was supposed to be doing. The other student helped me by translating some of what I was saying. The lower student ended up writing a summary of the article, but I don't think he truly understood what it was about. That was the only activity I helped with that day because the rest of the time was spent reading summaries and then editing the book for OPS. I felt like an observer, and I don't think I learned much from the experience,

November 16- The high school class did not meet because they were supposed to attend a leadership seminar for Asian students.

November 23- This was the last day of Saturday School for the semester. At first, only four students showed up to class (none of whom were there the last class). We merged our class with the junior high class because most classes were working on Thanksgiving activities. We worked on a worksheet writing specific things we were thankful for (something yellow, something small, something you can't see, etc.). This activity was fun because I had to be creative in explaining what some of the things were. I drew a lot of pictures and did a lot of actions. As the activity went on more high school kids showed up (again only 2 kids had been there the previous class), so we went back to our classroom.The other side of the worksheet had the alphabet and the students needed to write one thing for each letter that they were thankful for. We worked together as a class to come up with some creative things to be thankful for. We shared and then I led an art activity where we drew the things we were thankful for. We did a "stand up, hands up, high five" to share our pictures. To kill time at the end of class the teacher had the students write a note to someone they were thankful for. This class was very simple, I felt comfortable teaching the art activity, because I do that a lot in my classroom. There was nothing in this class that gave me the "Oh Wow" feeling. Many of the students admitted that they did not want to be there, and that made it difficult to teach. It is hard in a program like this, especially if the class changes from week to week.