Today we spent our morning at Colegio San Francisco; this is a local school in the Southern part of Cochabamba which is also the poorer end of the city. The morning session is from 8am to 1130am for children in grades kindergarten-fifth. We first arrived and the whole school was in a formation outside in the recess yard. The teachers began the day talking to all of them in a big group along with making announcements, singing songs and sayingthe national anthem while raising the flag. My self, Sandy and Bianca then split up into three separate classrooms of first graders.
During the first period we were all surprised to see the lack of hands-on involvement between the teachers and students. It was simply involving teaching them numbers and writing them over again on the board and then tranferring it to their notebook. Then came recess, this was our favorite part and a huge shock to us! All three of us exited our classrooms and were immediately trampled with dozens of kids just wanting to hug us, hold our hands, and have their picture taken. Through that 20 minute recess I lost a lot of hair because of the children constantly playing with it and pulling at me. Sandy lost a lot of arm hair, while Bianca almost fell over because of the huge crowd attached to her legs--they were so excited to have us there!
Then we started second period where we were all amazed to see that the teachers gave an assignment then left the classroom with just us to control 35 first graders. We learned from Javier that it is very common for the teachers to leave all age groups alone in the classroom for extended amount of periods. At this point chaos broke loose we had children climbing in and out of the windows of the classroom, along with wrestling one another on the floor and desks, they stretched Sandy's t-shirt (which is now too big!) Clearly, a rambunctious group! They put us to the test!
Right now we have arrived back at the house for lunch. at 130 we will head back to the school to meet and help with the highschool students. all three of us are very excited and looking forward to the rest of the day!
-Bianca Diaz 13'Jackie Keeley '12 and Sandy Hunter '13
