English Clubbin'

19:30 12 August 2008

Today I had one of the best successes for my service. We had our weekly English Club and for the first time, we used a lesson plan I created. I had designed it a while ago as a way to teach the fruits and vegetables that are common in Kyrgyzstan. Also for the first time, we had planned to divide the class but it was smaller this time (only 15 instead of the 20-25 we have had). In the past, we had all taught the class together in a sort of haphazard way, but this time I was the primary teacher with another volunteer and the other volunteers played a support role working with individual students. This proved a much more organized classroom and I believe a more effective lesson.

I believe my lesson was well-designed and I think it came out well. We got evaluated on our English club today and all received high marks, so that was an encouraging sign. The highlight of the lesson was when we divided the class into teams and I had a “garden” of pictures of fruit laid in a row in the middle of the class. One individual from each team took turns and I would say that I wanted a vegetable or fruit or English and they raced to identify and retrieve the chosen one. The kids seemed to enjoy the activity a lot, and by the end of the them, most could ask what each other was eating with some degree of accuracy and answer “I am eating a(n) ___”. Designing a plan on such a simple topic really showed me how difficult of a language English is though. The grammatical rules (a/an), plurals and singulars, and the presence of being verb (am/are/is) is difficult for Russian speakers (there is no to be in the present tense, you say I (am) boy or that (is) car).

This was a successful day, but boy am I exhausted. Last night we had our first rehearsal for Culture Day on Saturday where each village prepares a cultural presentation. We are doing Russian culture and our meeting consisted of the various host families yelling at each other unintelligibly to me (they speak so fast!). I had also brought my guitar and may be playing a Russian song, I was able to figure out the chords to what they were singing and they were impressed. Probably the funniest part was, completely unrelated to the purpose of the meeting, they asked me to play an American song, so the volunteers broke out into Hotel California. We are also going to do the Russian dance with the kicking. It is sooo hard. My legs are killing me today and I am seriously worried that I will sprain something Saturday. Oh well, we’ll deal with that if it happens.