Exam Week

This week is the first time that my students have an exam in all the ages. I am really hoping that they do well on their exams because it will be a partial reflection on my teaching. Seeing as I am only with each group of students for 1 or 2 hours a week, it is really hard to judge if they are learning. I feel that the teachers I work with don't do the best job of speaking English when I am not in the classroom. So, I will feel bad if my students do poorly on the exam, but I won't feel that it is all my fault. I have talked to the teachers and told them that they need to be speaking in English during bilingual time because the students need more practice, but seeing as English is difficult for them, many of them don't do it.

Today I read the first of many exams that I will read. In order for the students to perform well on the exam, the school believes that it is necessary to read the entire test to the students. I noticed that many of the students really seemed to understand the questions and got to work straight away on the answers. I also noticed that there were a few students who literally had no idea what was going on. The first question on the test was "Where does fresh food come from? Answer." and they had to trace "Fresh food comes from" and then write "plants and animals". I saw one girl trace/trace Fresh food come from Answer. I tried to explain to her about 10 times what the question was, but she had no clue. It made me a little sad that she was so clueless and that I could not help her since it was an exam.

I think that this week will be kind of boring at school because normally during an exam, I am sent out to prepare materials. I can only prepare so many materials, so it is hard to fill up all that time without seeming like I am sitting around and doing nothing.

After school today, I picked up Claudia and we had a lot of fun. I taught her how to do a cartwheel because she loves gymnastics. I also taught her how to play Go Fish and made her play it in English to practice the phrase "Do you have any" and numbers. She loved it. The only bad part about babysitting today was that Claudia decided to practice her recorder for an hour since she has an exam tomorrow. Now, I am sitting back at home with a giant headache :(