Teaching: Tuesday, May 6

This morning, don Jesús did show up to class, but he basically just sat in and let me teach. It was actually kind of nice because I had support if I needed it, but he gave me freedom to present the lessons as I saw fit. He also asked me how to say a lot of things in English.

The first class of today was 7th grade, and the theme was "Family." We reviewed and learned how to say all the members of the family. I started by writing family members in Spanish in a list on the board and having the kids tell me how to say them in English. Mother, Father, sister, brother, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, and uncle all went well, and then I taught them cousins, niece, and nephew.
We then moved on to another set of words, starting with English words and they'd say the word in English and then tell me the Spanish word, too. This list included "child, son, daughter, baby" etc. When we got to "baby," some of the kids were saying "bebé," and I said, clearly, "bay-bee" and then, on a whim, started singing the chorus of one of Justin Bieber's songs: "and I was like, Baby, baby, baby, Oohhhh!" I don't care for Justin Bieber or his "music," but I know that most of the kids in the school just love his songs. As I was singing, all the idle chatter in the class totally ceased and everyone just kind of stared at me, and when I was done, the kids cheered and applauded and told me to sing some more. I said we had to move on with the activity, but I was glad I was able to keep their attention and surprised that I actually found an educational use for a Justin Bieber song. :)

After that, the students wrote ten sentences using the words for family members. I gave them three "fill in the blank" examples, like "I am the _____ of my mother." "My mother is the ______ of my father." "My mother's sister is my_______."

Classes went very well today!
I took a video of the class but I'll have to upload it later. I uploaded a video for my Spanish blog when I came home, and it took more than six hours to upload a twelve minute video. Yikes.