Belize

Working through with the different grade levels in language arts, I found that there were some students who struggled with the activities that I had planned for them. When noticing these kinds of struggles it was obvious that we couldn't continue with the lessons planned, therefore, we had to simplify the lesson. The advantage that we had was that we were working with so many different age levels that if something was too difficult with one group then we used the activity from the prior group with the students. We didn't want to simplify the activities too much because without at least a small bit of challenge the students are not actually learning anything.  Throughout the three weeks of teaching and week of traveling in Belize, I realized that my passion is without a doubt teaching. Being told that I seemed as if I had my degree made me think about all the people who have asked me if I thought that I was making the right choice as far as my career, and how I always chose t

This week with my small group math activities I worked with number recognition with the younger students and multiplication with the older students. With the students working with the number recognition it seemed as if they were working simply with memorization. There is no reason behind why a number has the name that it does, but that is just the way we know it. There did seem to be some thinking when the students were putting together the hundreds chart, but not as much when it came to them putting 1-10 in order. I noticed often times that the students would simply guess the answers. This didn't only happen during the math activities, but when we went into the classrooms and observed any subject the teacher may have been teaching.  We knew coming down to Belize that the education system was different as well as the students learning abilities and styles, but there were still things that surprised me. This week one thing that surprised me was that some of the students struggled