14
Location: Galapagos
To start our day, we ate breakfast at our hotel at 7:00. At 7:30 we headed out the door and walked a couple of blocks down to the St. Francis of Assisi Escuela. We were in two groups, and we had lessons and games planned in English to teach the classes. Each group taught two classes. Group 1 taught them 15 common verbs with big cards to make sure the students saw the spelling too. They also ended up teaching one of the classes the Chicken Dance. Group 2 taught the classes many of the body parts and then sang Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes to them in English. We then reviewed right and left, hand and foot, and the colors red, yellow, green, and blue to play the game Twister on a giant board we made. After teaching the classes, we joined the kids outside for recess. We started a giant game of tag where we (ActionQuest/Lifeworks) were it and tried to tag the bunches of kids running around. After 20 minutes, we realized the kids started to chase us! Soon they were grabbing us and taking us to jail. They would latch onto our arms and drag us to the edge; they have strength in numbers! After we finished tag, we ate lunch from their cafeteria. We had noodles and chicken with an orange sauce and rice. We had a fruit bowl with yogurt and granola as well. After lunch, we painted the school’s walls for a couple of hours, and the walls looked much nicer and uniformed once we were done. After painting, James and Ivy treated us to ice cream! After ice cream, we had some time to walk around and shop. We stopped for a little bit and then we went to a cafe and ordered some drinks and snacks. Then around 5:30 we headed back to the hotel to meet together for our meeting. We had a meeting and a good discussion forum on the idea of privilege. After our meeting, we went to dinner at Hernan’s Cafe. We finished dinner and headed back to the hotel to shower and talk in the lobby before going upstairs and heading to bed. Our day of teaching English in Ecuador and painting was a lot of fun, but very tiring. Keep reading our Galapagos volunteer blog to see what we do next!