This week we had an interesting mix of themes. In Jalpa, Erin ran some awesome role-playing activities with the kids based around the concept of respect for the class and for one another. It was fun to watch the kids channel their (extremely high levels of) energy into acting out scenarios such as what to do when your donkey eats your neighbour's plants, or how to nicely tell your friend that he shouldn't be climbing on the roof of the school. Believe it or not, that scenario has been very frequently encountered. I also brought my guitar and played a few songs for them. Jalpa has rarely been so quiet! And I've never seen anyone so thoroughly fascinated by a capo. When I showed them how it changed the key of the guitar, it was as if I'd performed magic before their eyes. Hopefully I'll be able to learn a few simple Spanish songs so we can have sing-a-longs.
In La Palma, my morning primary class has started work on our "Latin American Myths" unit. Over the next few weeks, we'll be reading legends, learning where different stories come from, performing a puppet show based on the Zapotec legend, "How the Rainbow Was Born", and ultimately writing and illustrating our own myths. While I'm grateful that my class is so quiet and well-behaved that we can accomplish this much, I'm interested to see if acting will bring them out of their shells a little bit more or if they'll be too shy to enjoy it. As we've noticed some cliques in the class, I'll be borrowing some ideas from Erin and running role-play activities around themes of respect and inclusion next week. It should be good practice for presenting a puppet show! And if they like performing, we'll look at writing a play for the Christmas concert.
On Tuesday and Thursday, we learned about different characters in the myth and started to make our puppets. I gave the kids lots of supplies, and the googly eyes proved to be a big hit. So far their puppets look amazing! They've all turned out very differently and I think making the set will be a lot of fun too.
Yesterday's music class with the secundaria group was great. They've started to participate a lot more (although we still need to work on integrating the two boys, who sit separately at the back and seem to think their female classmates have cooties). Our class theme yesterday was reggaeton, a popular musical genre in Latin America, and music's influence more generally on its listeners/viewers. Although I made them read a pretty dry academic article, they did a really good job of summarizing and critiquing it. We discussed the difference between "liking" something and "identifying with" something, and they criticized the author's bias against reggaeton. We then watched some music videos (and ate some chips, as I'd promised), listening to the lyrics and talking about what message the videos were sending to their viewers. It was funny to see these teenagers so scandalized by scantily clad women dancing sexily, and I was predictably stoked when one student even referred to the women in the videos as "objects". Go feminism! I also enjoyed watching Pablo, the painfully quiet boy in the class, get pretty damn into it when we listened to Calle 13. Behind his fingerless gloves and heavy metal T-shirts, that boy's got taste.
We also started to learn a new song for the Christmas concert, John Lennon's "Imagine". We're going to be singing in English this time, and they practiced the pronunciation very diligently. I'm already looking forward to the Christmas event, although I know I'll be even more giddily exhausted than after Day of the Dead.
Overall, it was a pretty successful week. I can't believe we're almost halfway through the semester already - I'm going to be incredibly sad to leave my amazing co-workers and my brilliant, hilarious students.
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