This past week we had the students from Mexico join our zoom meeting again. With the weeks apart of seeing the children, my fears of nervousness started to come back. This time before meeting with the students we had time to prepare ourselves and have more of an outline of what was going to be done during our time with the students. We were put into groups the week before. With our groups we were supposed to come prepare with activities that we could do with the students. Everyone in my group had really amazing activities, however as a group we decided to do Scott activity. The activity was a matching game. Scott had made two columns of rows, one with a set of english words, and the other a row of the english words used but in spanish. There are also four categories for the group of words being basic vocabulary, body parts, emotions, and number. During our time with the students we would ask the students how to say the english word in spanish. Once the child got the word right we would draw a line connecting the the english and spanish word together. The game took up most of our time with the students but before we started the game we asked them questions so we could get the students and they would also get to know us. By starting off with getting to know each other’s questions I felt this was a great way to not only get us more comfortable but the students to feel more comfortable with us.
The last time we met with the students from Mexico I had mentioned in my reflection that I had one group that was very talkative and another not so much. This time both of the group of students, that our group had the pleasure to talk to were both very shy. At first it was very hard to be able to get the students to talk at all. From class readings one of the major points that have been stated in the readings that students who speak additional languages need the right resources to be able to succeed. From my past of working with children I have learned that sometimes a student who is too shy to speak at the start if you use actions as a resource this is a way for one to still be able to communicate with another without using words. One of my peers asked the students how they were? None of them were willing to say anything at the beginning. So I asked the question, are you guys good with holding my thumbs up, or are you guys bad with putting my thumbs down. I knew that thumbs up and down was an universality sign that is used that the students would be able to understand. Right away the students started to put their thumbs up and some of them even said good, which got the students to start talking. In all I really enjoyed this experience that I had gotten from taking this class. I found this was a really amazing way for us to experience what it will be like trying to teach a student who does not speak a lot of english.