Transatlantic Pen Pals

Did you ever have a pen pal? I had a couple growing up, and I really enjoyed it. So when I found out about the Worldwise Schoolprogram during my Peace Corps application process, I was really excited to participate. The program matches PCVs with a teacher in America, and their students can exchange letters. This lines up perfectly with Goals 2 and 3 of Peace Corps, the sharing of American culture with our host country, and vice versa. Unfortunately, Worldwise Schools had some technical difficulties the last couple years, and the three attempts I made at signing up came to naught. Colii also tried to sign up a couple times, and never heard back from them. (Side note - they have restructured the program and made improvements, so hopefully it will work much better for PCVs and American teachers in the future. It's such a cool idea.)

Luckily, Colii and I are PCVs, so we are practiced at having to be creative and resourceful to get things done. We decided to have the students in my Library Club exchange letters with the students in her Health Club. We had all the kids write letters, and then we matched them up together.

The Moldovan Pen Pals

               

The Malawian Pen Pals

I even gave my students a little one-page info sheet on Moldova, with a map and a photocopy of a postcard I got in Soroca when I visited there. Colii passed on some Romanian phrases to me, and I included those on the sheet as well. The Romanian phrases have really caught on, and now I regularly hear “Buna dimineata” and “pa pa” at school from my Malawian students! Even from kids that were not even involved in the pen pal program.

Letter writing was a great way for the students to practice their English and writing skills. It also taught them about another country. Sharing the culture of your host country with the people of your PCV friend’s host country isn’t one of the three PC goals, but it sure was a lot of fun!

Moldovan Moonshine??

When i got home from school yesterday, Mama-G told me to get a ”vodka glass” and meet her in the chicken coop...

...this is what i found...

...and drank 3 shots of to „la mulți ani” and „sănătate” ("many years” and "health”)

igienă personală

The next chapter i'm teaching about in my health class is about personal hygiene - hand washing, teeth brushing, bathing, clothes washing, room cleaning, etc. So to kick it off i created an introduction lesson which gave a brief overview of all the above mentioned stuff. Then i presented Ștefan. 

(Quick back story: Ștefan Cel Mare, aka, ”Ștefan the Great” was prince of Moldova for 47 years between 1457 and 1504. During his reign he fought against the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Hungary. Because of his dedication to protecting his country, he is considered a hero in Moldova and his statues, face, and name are EVERYWHERE.)

So, back to the story...Ștefan is a little boy who admires Ștefan Cel Mare and wants to grow up to be just like him. But 1st he needs help with his personal hygiene...

From there the students removed the dirty parts accompanied by the items needed to clean those dirty parts and placed them on a table i drew next to the poster that was separated into columns for how often those dirty parts need to be cleaned - several times a day, daily, several times a week, weekly, several times a month, or monthly. 

All the classes really enjoyed this activity. My 5th and 6th grade classes were even good and cooperative! Which was kinda funny and cute ;op

Here's Ștefan after he was all cleaned up!

To wrap up the lesson i did a word search, which they also LOVED! 

They took turns coming to the front of the class where i gave them a sentence to read with a missing word that they had to find in the puzzle. It ended up being another great activity! 

YAY for awesome FUN lessons!!! ...Now if i can just keep em coming... ;op

Elevii teach class!

Vacanță de toamnă is from Monday - Wednesday, so since I only had half of my classes that week, my clasa 9 homework assignment for that short week was that they were to teach the class. I was just hoping that at least 1 student prepared something, but they were actually pretty excited about it and i was impressed by the work they put into it (especially on their school break!)!

Above is Victor. He definitely put the most time and effort into his teaching. He drew and color-coded a skull and labeled all the parts. He even included classroom participation by handing out the labels and their functions separately so that the class had to guess where they belonged on the skull. I was flattered that he did that cuz that's exactly what i did for their digestive system class! It made me feel like they hopefully enjoy my classes and have fun with the activities and learn at least something :o] Thanks Victor! It was awesome!!!

I hung his cool diagram on the wall next to the digestive system diagram.

Next up was Victoria. She taught a lesson on ochii (eyes). She came prepared with detailed print outs of eye diagrams, which was also pretty cool...sorry, no pictures of that though. Thanks Victoria!

Tatiana was next. She taught about the nutrition of "favorite foods". Thanks Tatiana!

Finally Adriana and Mihaela taught about exerciții fizice (exercise). Thanks!

Overall, it ended up being a better idea than i originally thought to have them teach the class! I'm glad it worked out so great!

sistemul digestiv

This was a fun activity to teach about the digestive system! I cut out the names of the organs and their descriptions separately. I handed them all out and the students placed them on the diagram where they thought they belonged. Then my partner and i taught the lesson and at the end we asked if all the labels were correct. When the students realized they weren't, they corrected them. After that i gave them a blank poster and blank cut-outs of all the organs. As a class they colored the organs, glued them in their correct places on the poster, and correctly labeled it. Then we hung up their "masterpiece" in the class to show it off! :o]

...and saying words like "rect, anus, and fecale" wasn't as bad as i'd imagined it would be with middle-schoolers ;op