Day 3- la Lima and Santa Martha

This is a post written by Sarah. Increible! That would be the word to describe our day today.  I'll get into the details soon, but let me start with last night.  We headed to town for dinner and ate at a little hostel where the group from last week stayed.  It was right in the heart of matagalpa, with noisy traffic and people everywhere.  We barely fit inside, but it was cute and cozy. Almost all of us got the coconut curry, which was a steal at about $3.50, along with a beer for the steep price of $1. The curry was fantastic! We headed back and relaxed before bed. Today we didnt quite make it up for yoga before breakfast, but oh well. Today, in addition to our fruit and gallo pinto, we also had pancakes. Hooray!  Our bumpy, crazy ride was about twenty minutes shorter today since we were spending the morning in la Lima, which is down the hill a ways from Santa Celia.    Our job today was to work with the secondary students, who range in age from 13-18. They essentially wanted us to teach them how to be teachers.  This was right up Jessica and I's alley.  I will admit that I was a bit nervous about working with the older students, as I am used to working with little kids.  I wasnt sure how they would respond to us.  However, it turns out there was no need to worry.  They were very receptive and eager to hear what we had to say.  We started out teaching them a whole binders worth of gone and poems that we had brought.  We prepared enough materials to send copies to each community.  They absolutely loved this part. They wanted to sing them all over again when we finished.  I taught them all of the rhymes that I had made up for using in my classroom, for lining up, getting their attention, etc.  we thought that having some classroom management tools would be a very useful tool for them.  After singing for a while, we moved on to our math activities.  We had also order binders full of simple but fun math games for to play that require very little umpire or materials.  We obviously can't just give them worksheets that need to be photocopied, but we had to really think outside of the box about what kinds of games they could do over and over again. We came up with a lot of them that involved dice or flash cards, since w had brought a huge stash of those! They really seemed to get into the games.  Jessica and I would sit down on the floor and model how to play one, then we would have them try to play it in groups,  this allowed us to check to be sure that truly understood how to play, since they would be expected to teach them to the younger kids.  We then did some activities with the copies of chica chica bum bum that we brought.  This book is great for teaching letters and letter sounds.   We then taught them some fair tales, and let them practice reading them as well.  After that, we worked on doing an effective read aloud.  This was one of the most important things that we taught them, I think. We modeled for them how to talk about the pictures and to have students make predictions, connections, and more.  We had them practice this a lot with each other while we went around and gave them pointers. after about three hours of teaching, it was lunchtime (more beef jerky and cliff bars.)  After lunch, we headed up the hill a bit to Santa Martha.  Now it was time for our secondary students to use what they had learned.  We laid out all of supplies and told the students that they could come and pick out some materials to use, and when I turned around one minute later, they had already found themselves a group of children and were teaching! The 15 year old girl in the back was doing a read aloud in a fantastically entertaining voice and was asking them questions about what they thought  would happen next.  Another young man was singing the song that we had just taught about the vowels, complete with actions.  It literally gave me goosebumps to watch.  I was amazed at how these students just dove in, and actually used what we taught them. For an hour we just watched and gave tips while they played math games, sang songs, did rhymes, and read books with small groups.  The rest of the village was all crowded around the outside watching through the windows, and the kids loved it.  I can't say how proud I was of those kids. It felt like we were really doing a helpful thing by not just going in and doing fun things with the kids, but by teaching them how to teach, which will last so much longer and will have an even greater effect. Our principal said that maybe our new jobs should be to teach educators! I'm not giving up my day job just yet though. When we left, a few of the scholarship students thanked us personally, and the little ones asked when we were coming back. We are now on our ride home, and as i type, we just played a game of chicken with three cows in the road! The ride is bumpy but beautiful, and the view coming down the mountain is absolutely breathtaking.  The sun is shining through the trees, and the valley below looks amazing. I am sure  that my car mates ate getting sick of me exclaiming, "wow, just look at that view!"  I have taken hundreds of photos of this wonderful place, both the scenery and the people. It is truly an adventure of a lifetime, one that I will never forget.