The lesson planning sessions have been intensifying every day, but something was different this morning. That afternoon was to be our final class before the jungle trek, and we spent breakfast spitting out ideas for how to bring some closure to our students. While doing so meant attempting to avoid the same action with our food, it turned out to be quite productive; after washing our dishes, we spent the next four hours planning, rehearsing, and mastering the art of cutting construction paper. It’s a good thing, too; it was hotter today than most since our time here, and even the dogs had settled down enough to leave our feedback workshop unperturbed.

Though the stress of bringing all the material from the past 8 days into one lesson took its toll (in the form of nervous laughter, face-palming, and manic watermelon juice consumption), our class’s reaction to today’s lessons has prompted a strange thought in our group: what if the kids are too smart for us to screw this up for them? All we can think of is how we’ve bumbled around for over a week, trying to draw animals and gesturing wildly in the hopes that we may stall them long enough with our antics to stumble across a recognizable cognate; but, every day, the children show up, say hello through their impressively well-maintained smiles, and proceed to stun us with how much they’ve remembered. 

All we need to do now if figure out how to get ten highly intelligent wee ones across an ant-infested jungle floor using only English. But we have tomorrow to figure that out.


- Mason

            Today our entire group taught in the morning for the first time. This was a different experience for the groups that had been teaching at the Center!  Despite the fact that our students were on vacation, they still showed up for class.  Several people mentioned that students lose a fair amount of vocabulary over the weekend.  This was very true in the youngest class at the center!  For the 6-12 class, today was a day of review and practicing sentences for the hike on Wednesday.  After teaching all morning, many of us were feeling the affects of the heat and went to La Pechuga (the swimming hole) for a swim. 

            Later in the afternoon, we went back to the trail where we would take our students hiking on Wednesday.  This was our chance to figure out what exactly we wanted to show our students and how to best structure the activities or worksheets that they would be doing during the hike.  We also learned some new things related to the hike such as what an agouti is, and that if you are ever unsure about whether something is infested with ants, chances are, it probably is. 

            After the hike, we headed back to the center for dinner and to plan our final full lesson.

~Louisa    

It's day six, and the air is thick here at the Centro. Literally, the 
air is thick and this has been one of the most humid days we've experienced yet, and as I step out of the classroom to grab a bite to eat, I'm practically dripping with sweat. But the air's also thick with excitement and energy, bright and loud. 

Today's the day, it seems, that everybody pulled it together, as every person in every group seems to be positively thrumming. Certainly the fact that it's Friday has something to do with it (as does perhaps the impending promise of hot springs and ice cream in La Fortuna tomorrow), but for those teaching the older group and for those teaching the young 'uns, lessons just wrapped up and I see no thunderclouds above any heads, so I'm assuming it's the lessons.

My own group (Team Baby Sloth!), which consists of Adeline, Stefanie, Devin, and myself, certainly pulled through today with one hell of a powerhouse lesson. Addie went first, taking on the difficult task of opening classes (difficult because it's always impossible to tell exactly when class will start, or exactly how many students we'll start off with) with aplomb, wrapping up Devin's lesson about celery and hypotheses from Thursday before diving into her own lesson and introducing the students to the our theme for the day, Water in Costa Rica. Stefanie followed up with a million-and-a-half little experiments for the students, including one particularly cool diorama involving tin foil, water, toilet paper, and food coloring that quite nicely explained the effects of erosion on the environment. Following a brief break, I took my turn at bat, covering the past tense with a couple of games and a great, big Ad Libs-style activity I expected a reasonable response from the students, but I was shocked at how much they got into all of my activities. Devin wrapped up our lesson for the day with a rousing game of Taboo, cleverly turned from a rather competitive game into a fantastic team-building exercise that had the students shouting in startlingly perfect English. To wrap up the day, our group presented the class with some maple sugar candy that we had brought with us from the great snowy North, which they gobbled up in a matter of seconds.

So, spirits are soaring, grub is on, and the fresca is particularly good as we all settle into our first Friday evening and our fifth day of teaching at the Centro.

It’s our fourth day at the Centro Espiral Mana School, and the cicadas are as active as ever. Some teachers went swimming today at La Pechuga swimming hole to release some teaching stress, and escape the heat for just a little while.

The group teaching the youngest group (6 to 12 year olds) taught the students prepositions of location today, as well as reviewed the animals and nature nouns we taught on Tuesday. One activity that was particularly successful, yet not planned, was when we had the kids stand in a row and asked certain people to stand next to, behind or in front of another person.

For the group teaching in San Isidro, there were a lot of sudden changes in teaching schedules because of miscommunication with the school. It was difficult to adjust their lesson plans to fit into the children’s schedule, but they grew closer as a group because of it. Ariel did a tree find, which was an activity where each student has a partner and one is blindfolded, and each student leads their partner to a certain tree and the person has to find it again. This activity went very well with the kids and assisted in their learning.

Today, the group teaching young adults introduced the terms environment, ecosystem and ecology, which will be extremely useful when on the final class hike. A particularly funny moment of the day was when Mike said, “Monkeys don’t give a sh**,” when he actually said, “Monkeys don’t eat fish.” This was a funny moment that gave a light air to the day’s lessons. Overall, the group felt like their lessons fit together well, which was exciting because that was their first official day of teaching. Caitlin Hargrove