Day Two as a Volunteer

My second day at Pies Descalzos! Yay! I never thought I would actually be saying that, it makes me so happy and proud to be here. Which by the way, Shakira's first music album was named Pies Descalzos 

Today I arrived at 8 am, a little earlier than I did yesterday to get things started. I met another volunteer who is from Chile and graduated with a degree in Psychology. She has been here for a couple of months emphasizing psychology exercises on the children. I went with her to a second grade classroom to check out her class. She made a presentation on PowerPoint about her country and its culture. I was observing her presentation as well as how the children reacted to the presentation and each slide. I was advised that I had to do a similar presentation about my culture for another classroom this week. Since children have short attention spans, I wanted to be sure I created a presentation that would have them focused at all times or at least 80 percent of the time.

Even the puppies go to school here. Hehehe.

Recess. They eat their snacks (merienda) at about 11:00am.

The little girl is explaining a dress that her aunt gave to her. 

After her presentation, a group of women came in the classroom to do another project that was related to culture. These groups of women are the mothers of some of the children that attend the school. They created another foundation within Pies Descalzos called “Creciendo en Amor” translating to Growing in Love. The purpose of the foundation is to also educate the parents about child development and education. It is very important to have the parents involved because they need to encourage the children to go to school and get an education. The women in Creciendo en Amor regularly have meetings to discuss situations at home and sometimes people come to speak and educate them such as psychologists and lawyers. Today they went in the classroom to have the children work on a project where they have to either draw or write about their country and their culture. One little box asks them to draw their family and in the other one it says to draw the most beautiful thing in their country. These letters are then sent out to other students at another school in Spain. We worked on this project for the rest of the afternoon in different classrooms and I assisted with providing instructions and helping the kids with ideas. We then went to the main office and sorted the letters out and organized them in different groups.

I spoke to the volunteer coordinator and she told me to prepare the presentation for tomorrow! Although it was very short notice, I was excited to do it. I am currently working on the presentation but I took a quick break to write my blog. They are only in second grade so some of them still cannot read therefore I want to involve a lot of pictures rather than words and I will just talk a little through the slides. My objective, like I stated before, is to have them focused on the presentation the majority of the time. Let’s see how it turns out!