International August Preparatory Summer Camp - Week 2

This week was my second week working with the refugee. Over the weekend I prepared many different activities that I believed to be helpful when learning a language. As someone who speaks more than one language I related and used my previous knowledge and tried to apply it to my lesson plans and how I would construct my lessons. The first thing I learned when learning a language such as Spanish was the alphabet. Learning how to write each letter individually in lower and upper case, and also learning the proper pronunciation. In my opinion you can’t get far if you don’t know the alphabet or how to say each letter. I started off the day by reviewing the alphabet, seeing if it looked familiar to him and then going deeper and learning how to write and pronounce the letters. Like teachers with young elementary students I would say the letter and he would repeat it back. At the beginning he learned the alphabet by memory but as soon as I noticed that I quickly changed my strategy. Saying the alphabet backwards and also singling out letters that I saw he had difficulty with. By the end of the week he had the alphabet mastered and didn’t have to look at the chart or think about how to say the letters on their own. Progress is slowly being made but it’s there. The next thing that I planned on focusing on was numbers. These things to me are things that even I myself use on a daily basis. Numbers are things that I use everyday in many different situations. We started off small by learning just one to ten, saying and writing them individually. To check for his understanding I had him translate the numbers into Arabic and he did so with flying colours. Once one to ten was mastered I pushed it one step further. I brought up a one hundred chart and we practised every single number over a span of two days. Little by little I saw the understanding grow and the need to count every number before the number I asked him to say decreased everyday. Now we are halfway through this summer camp and I look at all the progress he has made and it brings me joy. Even though he was the only student from Syria there was still a classroom full of students from a variety of countries in Asia. During the lunch hour they were given, he would interact with the other students through a friendly game of basketball or soccer, two sports that he enjoys very much. To me sports was the best way to interact, even though he couldn’t physically say much he could talk through sports. I watched his social progress get stronger and stronger as the days passed. I would see one more smile than the day before and one more spoken word as well. I knew from the beginning this project would be a challenge and it hasn’t proved me right yet, but I will say that finding appropriate materials that would cater to his level was not easy. All the material I had from my previous students was too advanced. More for students who already had a basic grasp of the English language. To me he was no different than the other students I have taught in the past. I knew even before he came to me that my life would be changed forever, how I would view things in the world or in my life, would never be the same after this experience.