Teaching English – Continued.

Despite the success of our first night teaching English to Mexican Migrant workers, I knew we had to come up with an actual lesson plan to follow in the weeks to come. I thought about what I would find it useful to know coming to a country where you didn’t speak the language:

Days of the week, Greetings, food, money and how to explain what hurts to a doctor or dentist.

I looked online for ESL Teacher sites, and there is a lot of information out there, but it mostly seemed to involve grammar. I’m not saying that isn’t important, but I just didn’t think that was where we really needed to go at this point. Maybe further down the road.

I made up some exercise sheets with questions with fill in the blank answers – along the lines of “My hair is ________” as we learned colours. And similar ones for learning body parts, days of the week, etc.I went to the store and bought a white board and some markers, and a game with pretend bills and coins to learn about our money.

Then I thought about the CDs I am using to try and learn Spanish. Everything is repetition, so I decided that we would build on what we taught from week to week, and keep reviewing everything as we go.

Our second class went well too. The ladies even put out snacks for us! We went over what we had covered the week before, and then added to it. It seems to be working. They are so eager to learn that it makes it easy. We had a lot of fun.

Last Friday evening I had just arrived home from work when there was a knock at the door. It was a young man that works for my husband – I knew I’d seen him there, but hadn’t actually met him before. He said my husband had hired him to come by the house and do some maintenance so we went into the backyard and I was making small talk with him while we waited for my husband to get home. He said he is a full time student at the University and works for my husband part time. I asked what he is taking at school and he said Business. He went on to say that he would love to find a job teaching ESL but it’s difficult because he has no experience….. my eyes lit up and I got a huge smile on my face. I couldn’t believe the coincidence! I was just about to launch into my “do I have an opportunity for you” when my husband came around the corner. He had heard the last sentence. All he said was, “Justin, run”.