First Lesson

Last week I taught my first lesson independently at Colegio Los Robles. It was an English lesson about education and school life in the United States. The teachers were doing a unit on Education so they asked me if I could share with the student what the Education system was like in the United States. At first I though it would be a really complicated subject to teach to English Language Learners because I was thinking about it from a very political point of view. How was a supposed to teach 7^th graders who don’t speak much English about state standards and standardized testing? I began to plan the lesson by starting with what they already knew about school in the US. This led me to finally doing what I had been trying to avoid: watching High School Musical. After that life-changing experience I decided to take a more basic approach to the lesson and teach about what daily life was like at school and focus on the classes kids their age take and the activities available. This turned out to be really successful because all the student had of course seen High School Musical, Mean Girls, Daddy Daycare, etc. I taught them about what US schools were like for students and they shared with me how it was similar and different from their experience in Argentina. I included video clips and photos that kept them engaged the whole time. The lesson ended up lasting over 2 hours because they had so many questions about the general educational experience in the US and my personal experience. They were especially interested in Prom and Cheerleaders. I had them to a Ven-Diagram comparing and contrasting the US and Argentina. The only thing I would change is I would have liked to have a smaller group of students so I could provide them with a little more individual assistance with their vocabulary and sentence phrasing. If I were to do a follow up lesson I think I would work with them on some of the compare and contrast vocabulary words and using them in full sentences.