Inside Out: Week 1

  

Trying to organize 90 kids for snack and entering the museum.





I am now Miss Liz from 9am - 12pm and Coach Liz after lunch until 4pm. I survived the first week of Inside Out summer camp at Alliance Academy. We have 90 kids, and may have more next week! Right now I'm teaching a class of 6 first graders - who have surprised me with how much English they know! They are so cute, and for the most part, very well behaved. We have class in the mornings, and then sports and recreation in the afternoon. This first week we were playing basketball - I attempted to teach lay-ups and referee a scrimage on the last day. On Wednesday we had a field trip in the morning instead of class: we went to el Museo del Agua (the water museum). I quickly learned that field trips are more work than teaching. We had to get all the kids on buses, then try and have them eat snack and stay in line to go into the museum. They seemed to have a lot of fun learning about water melting from the glaciers in the mountains, how to filter water, ocean currents, storms, and really anything else related to water. All my students told me the next day that their favorite part was the bubble room. Then Thursday we had a trip to go swimming in the afternoon. So after lunch we all got on buses and drove to one of the kid's houses outside of Quito. It was a big house, with a clay tennis court, volleyball court and the pool - but we had to take turns swimming. It was another rather chaotic afternoon, but no one drowned, so...After yesterday I was exhausted. Two more weeks to go!

Bubbles!



One of my students playing in the bubble room.

Learning about clean and polluted water.

Everyday Adventures

What else would you do at an Arabian horse show?

There were some other Houghton students staying after the mayterm class they took in Ecuador. So our first weekend we went to an Arabian horse show with Lois - who is kind of in charge of us and works at Alliance Academy International (AAI). She love horses and invited us to the show - which was like a dog show in a lot of respects. The trainers paraded the horses around a ring and made them stretch their necks out to have them judged on their good looks. But there were a couple other components to the show. There were a two performances where the horses "danced" and in one (left) the horse made a few jumps over a flaming bar! We stayed all afternoon waiting for the raffle at the end - Lois was hoping ot win a colt, but unfortunately did not. So we've been doing odd jobs around the school - its been pretty busy because graduation is coming up! Our first day we were recruited to be subsitute teachers becuse they were missing 5 teachers that day. So I subbed in high school math - I've forgotten a lot since I haven't taken math since first semester, so I wasn't very helpful to the few students who asked me some questions. And we also helped test Pre-K students' English fluency. That was fun, especially the answers kids would give to some of the questions.

Working at a community in Cotopaxi.

We are also working with MAP International - a Christian development agency. MAP is based in Atlanta and has field offices all over the world.  They work to develop the region, in which they are located, through education and prevention. We have been joining them to start up a youth program in the communities in the mountains of Cotopaxi - a region to the south of Quito. We played a mixer game with the kids and then Maggy talked to them about the program and got a feel for who was interested in joining. We were gone all afternoon, and on our curvy drive back we drove through a cloud!

A first grade Spanish class at Alliance Academy.

The next morning at AAI I went to a first grade class and shared a little with them about my experience in Costa Rica - I showed them pictures and told them about the places we'd visited. They are so cute! And I found out that I'm going to be teaching 1st grade for ESL camp! That should be exciting! I obeserved some other classes around the school - including some high school Spanish classes and some ESL classes. We've basically just been doing whatever we're asked to do, and I anticipate that's how it will be for the rest of the month before I start teaching in July!