Teaching Tuesday: Plate Animal Faces

Like Spanish and American culture in general, the culture in schools are very different. 

On top of the cultural differences, the language barrier makes things very difficult/interesting/exhausting.

I teach English Conversation and Science. Conversation is pretty simple and fun...

Science on the other hand takes a lot more thought in planning to make fun, engaging, age and language appropriate lessons. 

We don't really have a curriculum guide so we're pretty much on our own to think up and plan lessons.

In 2nd grade we were learning about animals and I saw so many cute animal face plate ideas on the internet so I thought I'd be a great fun craft to go along with a little bit of writing.

Oh man was I so wrong in the amount of time, teaching and patience that would go along with this. 

For starters, asking the kids to write something in a language they can't even hardly speak in equals the first bad idea. I changed the plan and had them just circle what characteristics their animal had instead  of having to think of things. Then they copied what they circled on the paper. duh, way better.

Second, they don't do very many crafts outside of holiday crafts, so the management of the whole construction paper passing out, breaking of plates, following directions, etc... was a disaster!

Thankfully by week 3 of the project, I figured out a few ways to make things run a little smoother and here we have some super cute animals!

 shark and lion

 snake and dog

the poster we made the first week to learn about different animals

In the end, I was happily surprised by their creativeness they put into their animals. 

They were so cute going around showing each other their animals.

Hopefully next week I can get them to share about their animals in ENGLISH!

{{*DON'T use plastic plates. I didn't have a choice since I couldn't find paper plates anywhere, but they are not ideal to color or glue things on.}}