Now that the end of the school year is quickly approaching I´m beginning to get a little sad. I´ve realized that I´m really going to miss my students when I return to the states.
I´m even sadder about the fact that next week will be my very last week teaching the infantil (4 and 5-year old) classes and the first and second grade classes. For many teachers, it might seem like a relief to not have to deal with the younger kids from now on but, for me, it`s torture.
It´s crazy how much things change. At the beginning of the year I was so terrified of going into the first grade classroom; yet alone having to enter the infantil rooms (the children were just 3 and 4-years old at that time). On the other hand, when I had my 3rd-6th grade classes I was so relieved. Now, however, I get so excited when I know that I’m going to see my younger kids whereas teaching the older ones no longer excite me as much.
I can’t imagine what the rest of the semester will be like without going into my infantil classes. I won´t be bombarded at the door with lots of hugs and kisses when I walk into the classroom anymore. I won’t have a little child running up to me every couple of minutes crying because he/she fell or because someone hit or kicked him/her, and I won´t see children get so excited about having English class, singing the songs and playing the games that they have learned and saying ¨Good Morning, LaTasha.¨ I’m really going to miss that.
Anyway, now that we only have a week left in the infantil classes we’ve been spending our days reviewing songs and playing games in English. We´ve been playing ¨Who took the cookie from the cookie jar,¨ doing ¨the hokey pokey¨ and singing ¨if you’re happy and you know it.¨ Last week the other teacher asked me if I could think of another game to play that would take up a lot of class time. Because it´s been a while since I´ve been in elementary school I had to turn to the internet to be reminded of all of the games I used to play. Then, after doing a little research, I remembered one of my favorite childhood games…Duck, Duck, Goose!
After explaining to the teacher the rules of ¨Duck, Duck, Goose, ¨ she thought that it would be a perfect game to play. On Tuesday, I went into the infantil classes and explained the rules of the game (in English) to the children. At first they were a little clueless but after drawing pictures of a duck and goose (that's when I realized that I had no idea what a goose was) on the board and giving them a demonstration of how the game is played they immediately understood and were pretty excited to play the game.
The teacher and I decided to take the children outside to play the game since it was a very nice day and there wasn’t much space in the classrooms. We decided to have one of our English students start the game, since they understood it more and knew how to say ¨duck¨ and ¨goose.¨ One by one, the delegated person would go around and designate their ducks and goose.
Eventually, the game started to become so hilarious. Some of the children knew how to say ¨duck¨ but once they got to the person that they wanted to be the goose they just sat their hand on that person’s head and waited for us to say the word. Some of the children wanted so badly to be goose that they would raise their hand and say, in Spanish, ¨pick me, pick me¨ (I told them that this wasn’t allowed). Some of the children kept trying to pick people that had already gone despite me telling them several times to pick a new person. And the funniest moment of all was seeing the students’ reactions when they realized that they were chosen to be goose. Most of them forgot all of the rules at that point and took off running, oftentimes in the wrong direction. Some of them forgot that they were actually supposed to sit in the other person’s seat and they just kept running around in a circle. Lastly, the expressions on their faces were the cutest things that I have ever seen. I have never seen 4 and 5-year olds look so determined. The other teacher talked about how we should have recorded their facial expressions. By the end of the game I was sure that the students had learned at least 4 new words (which may or may not be very beneficial): ¨duck¨, ¨goose¨, ¨run¨, and ¨faster¨.
Playing ¨Duck, Duck, Goose¨ with the 4 and 5-year olds this week definitely made my day. I’m so sad that I won’t be teaching them in June but I can definitely say that some of my best teaching memories were with them. There’s no way that I could ever forget each of their beautiful faces and spontaneous (and mischievous) personalities.
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