Upon returning to PST from our visit to Sisian, we found that there was to be a change in the normal schedule to which e had grown accustomed. We would continue to go to Armenian language lessons every morning, but instead of the TEFL tech training sessions in the afternoons, we would collaborate with the English teachers at our village schools to host a 4 English Club sessions with their students.
In Shahumyan, this meant working with two English teachers and a group of about 40 students- half from the 8th grade and half from the 5th grade. The first day we were back in Shahumyan we met with the English teachers to plan the four clubs sessions.
Sam and I ended up working with the older students' teacher, and if I'm being honest, it wasn't as easy as I might have hoped. The teacher was pretty set on a few ideas and activities for which she was already prepared. Plans outside these ideas and activities were met with strong resistance. But most of the ideas were (to our minds) very traditional classroom activities that were neither very engaging for the students nor very fun for them. Given that these four sessions were supposed to be an after-school club activity, not another class, and that we were only going to work with the students for a grand total of 4 hours stretched out over the course of a week, we thought that the best thing to do with our time was to try to make it fun and give the students a positive associate to English learning- that is, not doing more read-and-translate activities like the ones they do during the school day.
We ended up compromising: we would structure the club week around the four seasons like our local collaborator wanted, and we would start each session with a more traditional written activity before transitioning into (what we considered) the more active, engaging, fun, activities we wanted to do.
The first club session was Autumn themed. I actually had to call out sick from this day because I had a cold, but Sam reports that it went fairly well. We started by talking with the students about Autumn and Halloween. We talked about Jack-o-Lanterns, and in doing so we discussed the names for parts of the face, and the words for various shapes. Then our counterpart led the students in a Halloween themed crossword puzzle. I can't speak about it first hand since I was home in bed, but from the accounts of the other volunteers who were there, it sounded as if the students had already done this activity and were remembering the "correct answers" rather than authentically engaging with the English language.
This wouldn't be terribly unusual- and not even considered duplicitous here as it would be in the States. A significant amount of education here involves memorizing the correct answers to a particular set of questions and reciting them back to a teacher at a later time. Given this, having students memorize the correct answers to a crossword puzzle is just how you get them to learn the material.
After the crossword puzzle, we moved onto the more active portion of the session: the students had been instructed by their teacher to bring pumpkins and knives to the first session, and a pair of scissors to the second session. Unfortunately, the message must have gotten confused somewhere along the lines, since most of them brought scissors to the first session. But six students had brought pumpkins and knives, so we broke into teams and carved some pumpkins. (Note: pumpkins in Armenia are very different from pumpkins in the US. I hope they're tasty, because they're not particularly well suited to carving). The day finished with each team explaining what face-parts they had carved into their pumpkins, and what shapes they had used to represent each of the face-parts,
The second club session was Winter themed. We started the session by having the students brainstorm "winter words": snow, ice, cold wind, jackets, mittens scarfs, etc. After the brainstorm, we presented the students wit ha mad-lib style poem, and worked together to fill in the blanks in the poem with words from our brainstorm. Then we gave the students some time to write their own poems- either completely original works, or following the mad-lib framework we provided. Finally, students were given a second piece of paper and instructed how to fold and cut it into a snowflake. Then we used some of our Peace Corps issued dental floss to tie the snowflakes onto the bottom of their winter poems, so that each student had a small project to bring home with them at the end of the day.
The following day, Spring, we started with a really good listening activity of which I was actually quite proud, considering that I helped to come up with it about 15 minutes before we actually started the session. Sam had written a 3 paragraph text about "the environment" and the importance of not littering. I took a look at it and selected 3-5 words from each paragraph. We started by pre-teaching these 3-5 words as vocabulary, then I told to students to listen for these vocab words, and every time I used one, they had to stand up from their seats and sit back down again as fast as they could. They loved it. Each wanted to be the first out of their seat, so they were literally jumping from their chairs as I read the passage. We went through all three paragraphs, asked a few listening comprehension questions, then moved onto the main activity for the day: trash pickup. Working with the younger students, the kids broke into teams and in an Earthday-style scavenger hunt, they went around the school grounds picking up the littered papers and candy wrappers from the ground. They team with the most trash in their bag would win a prize we told them (I don't think we ever delivered...)
Finally, we reached the end of our club week and conducted our Summer themed session. It was to be and action-oriented, game-filled day. We started by asking students to brainstorm action words that they do doing the summer: run, jump, smile, laugh, swim, etc. Using these words we then played a few games including charades and a fun relay race where each member of a team was given an action word and then had to run to the board where had had hug a variety of action-pictures. They player had to slap the picture matching his or her word, then run back and slap the hand of his or her team mate, who received the next word and the process was repeated until all members of the team had played.
After this, because they weather was nice, we brought them all outside and played a game of Sharks and Minnows- which, if you haven't played it before, is like an odd combination of tag and Red Rover, Red Rover. When a minnow student was caught by a shark, she or he had to say and act out 3 action words in English in order to be let go, otherwise they became a shark. The kids were still playing when we left- which was 30 minutes past the scheduled end of the club session. We didn't stop them to get a picture because they were having such a good time.
All in all, I think that clubs week went pretty well. I don't know how much English the students learned, but they seemed to have a good time. And we got a chance to work with a local counterpart for the first time. I'm a little upset with myself that we didn't really involve our counterpart very much-it seems like a wasted opportunity. Working with a counterpart is pretty much all we'll be doing for two years, and as this was our only chance to practice while training, I should have taken better advantage of it. Perhaps the Peace Corps could do more to facilitate this in the future- like introducing us to our counterparts more than a weekend before the clubs start, so that we have more time to schedule meetings together to plan. I gave this as feedback to the trainers, but I doubt that it will be acted upon... unfortunately, PC doesn't seem very open to the idea of changing its training techniques.
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