Filling In

Last Saturday, Haroun, Alisher, and I taught a class for Fawwaz and Syed. This Saturday, I think we will take part of their class in order to reduce the size of the group. It was great to get an opportunity to teach again, especially after so many unanticipated problems with getting a class together for us to teach! The group was active and diverse; they were dressed in all manners, and they came from many different countries. We were nervous to teach the group at first, as it was like the first day for us all over again! We did not know what the learners knew or how varied the skill level of the group was. But Haroun did really well at starting us off; he had every learner introduce himself, and then had every learner come up and talk about his family. It took a while, but it was a really good exercise because it enabled each learner to practice both speaking and listening skills, all without one of us teaching them anything! Before the break, we had the learners practice describing my family (I unearthed a picture from my computer so that they could point at different members of my family). This was a lot of fun, especially since we got to introduce new words such as "grandfather," and I got to remember just how much my hair has grown since the last family photo!

After the break, we went over pronouns. This was challenging because pronouns are a bit abstract, as you can't point at anything and say, "This is a pronoun." The greatest challenge was describing the meaning of the word "she" while being the only girl in the room! Alisher helped me out with that. But everyone caught on, and it was really great to see the learners using pronouns and possessive words by the end of class. There were a few learners who were shy, but they would participate if called upon to do so, which was encouraging.

Lastly, we decided to take a group photo. This was a lot of fun for the learners! So many of them had cameras, and they wanted to stop at many locations on the way to the bus to take group pictures. Perhaps we can use this to teach in the future- photo scavenger hunt, anyone?

Overall, it was great to teach this class on our first day teaching in a while!