Monday Refection - Sarah Pierce

Another exciting day at Red Bank today! Exhaustion is trying to set in but we are persevering and bringing the energy to the classroom. My students spent all of last week working on writing poetry so today we switched gears and started reading. The students read Maya Angelou’s A Woman’s Work, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s I Am Offering This Poem, and Zarick L. Robinson’s A Little Brother Follows Me. I split the students into three teams and then from there split them into partners. Each team had a different poem and each partner group had a different stanza. The students read each stanza, predicting what may have come before or what may come after, who is speaking in the poem, and what/who they are speaking about. The students had a lot of knowledge of poetry vocabulary, helping me define stanza, line, rhyme, and alliteration, but struggled a bit at first to read the poems. However, once they got into the swing of it and really started looking at the context clues and making predictions, their comprehension was beyond impressive. They were using cues like the word “children” in the first line of Maya Angelou’s poem to predict that the speaker was probably a mother. They noticed the theme of love in Baca’s poem by looking at the repetition of the last line in each stanza- “I love you.”

My co-teacher, Hannah, works in a day care in the states and had her students write letters to our students in Belize. Today at the end of my lesson, to give the students a “brain break” I had them read the letters and write their own letters back. I was completely blown away when the students opted to miss out on recess to continue writing their letters. They told the students in the states all about their homes in the village, their favorite foods, their pets, and what they like to do for fun when they are not in school. They were so surprised that students all the way in the states would write to them and that their own letters would make it all the way back to them!

Since I am teaching two classes and we will have a half day tomorrow, I had to say goodbye to one class today. It was emotional and a tough goodbye but tears flooded my eyes when two students brought me hand-written notes that they had worked on at home. The heat can be tough and the days can be long but I have never been a part of a more rewarding experience and moments like that one will stay with me forever. These students have a passion for learning that is like nothing I’ve seen before and I am blown away every day by their willingness to work hard and try new things. It will be another emotional goodbye tomorrow but I am looking forward to a tour of the village given by the student government while their teachers work in PD. It is hard to believe this experience is coming to an end already but I am so grateful that I’ve been able to be a part of the classrooms and community at Red Bank.

Sarah Pierce