Day 4 - going with the flow!

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