Well, I've been learning about how to be a teacher for quite some time now, and here in the Philippines I was THE teacher. The only one. The head woman. I messed up a lot, I did a lot of things well, and I learned a TON!
We started school every morning (Monday-Friday) at 8:00 am. The first few weeks start time was rough. We were never starting on time and I was getting kind of frustrated about it when I remembered a promptness incentive that one of my high school teachers, Mr. Wilson, used. If everyone was present and on time we would earn a letter to spell "Popcorn Party." When we spelled the word out we got to have a party day. So, I decided to tweek it a bit to fit our situation and I decided that if everyone was on time and had begun writing in their journals at 8:00 sharp we would earn a letter to write out Late Start.
Once we earned all of the letters they got to start school at 9:00 the next morning. They bought into it and promptness improved dramatically! They earned 2 late starts in the last 5 weeks of school, and I was pretty proud of them.
We held school down in the kitchen/dining/living room. It worked out pretty well. Here are "the guys" working hard in the other part of the room.
So, the curriculum was basically just reading, writing, and math. Rix and Lillian, the 8th and 7th graders, were signed up through BYU's Independent Study program for English and Math courses. They were able to basically self run those. I would make sure they were on track and tell them what they needed to accomplish each day. I helped with concepts they didn't quite understand and quite a bit with their writing sections which was fun for me. They have large vocabularies and write with great voice which makes it fun to read their work. The finals for their courses have to be taken once we get home, so I will go down to Provo to help them get set up with that and get those classes finished up!
Reed and Faith, the 3rd and 4th graders, took more of my time, and it was so fun to be able to work one-on-one with them. They had some morning work that they had to do together that worked on general Language Arts things like the difference between "it's" and "its," pronouns, adverbs, etc. Then one of them would stay and do math with me while the other one went and did their individual reading. Then they'd switch. Math started out as coming straight from the book. It was fairly boring, but they were doing pretty good at it, so I didn't worry too much about it. Then I taught one lesson to Faith using the concept from the book, but I just put it in different, more real life context, and she did so much better with it! So, I decided to do more of that the last few weeks and it made math much more fun!
Their reading improved a lot just from reading to themselves for a good 30 minutes every day and then a mixture of them reading out loud to me and me reading out loud to them for about 10 minutes each day. It was fun for me to see their improvement just from spending time reading. It's so important.
After the first couple of days with the younger kids I knew that I was going to need some kind of incentive to get the younger two students to cooperate and stay focused. Luckily, I had been taught about these awesome positive/negative charts by my CFA at the last elementary I did my practicum at. Each morning during journals I would hand them their positive negative chart.
They would write their goal and then they would get awarded positive or negative points based on their behavior and the work they got done. It worked marvelously! If they met their goal they got to do whatever our afternoon activities were, but if they didn't quite meet it, they didn't get to go. Luckily we only had one or two days where they had to stay home.
One of my favorite parts about school was science with Faith. At the start we had to do the water cycle and measuring weather units to cover the standards, but after that we got to learn about whatever she wanted. It was fun and we learned about many things from whale sharks to how rice is planted and harvested.
Finally the two younger kids would end each day doing multiplication facts on Oswego. At the start this was maybe the most dreaded part of their day, but as they got better at them they LOVED Oswego! Most of the time they would do it more than their required number of times. They are super good at their multiplication facts and have both passed of mixed multiple times. I was so proud of them!
Half way through our home school experience I had each of them write down things they liked and things they would like to see change. One of the main things they liked was that they got to do school in their pajamas :) I don't blame them one bit! One of the things they didn't like was doing work with their sibling. We talked about families and how sibling relationships are so important. The partner work improved drastically afterwards, and I learned about how important it is to see how your students feel about how school is going.
I will most likely never have another teaching experience like this. I lived with my students. I lived with my boss. I lived with my student's parents. It was interesting. Some parts were hard, some parts were nice. I learned a lot about a lot, but I still have so much to learn! Overall, it was a very good experience and I'm so glad I have it to look back on and learn from.
