Plummet To Summit: Honduras Day 5: Feeling Inspired

Today actually wasn't too eventful of a day. I woke up today pretty exhausted from the weather, school, and staying up late for classes and homework. As always, I helped teach some lessons for the class and helped the teacher whenever they needed it. Something I had them do today was make a cartoon. They are wrapping up their study on structure of text, so I had them pick a type of one and make an example in the form of a cartoon. For this project, I don't think they enjoyed it as much as the other activities we have done. They did well on the assignment, but you could tell that they just wanted to be done and rushed to get it done. I get it, it is a Friday and maybe they just didn't enjoy it as much. It taught me how to fix it to make it a little bit more interesting for them. Sometimes your students just won't like the activities, and that's fine. You learn and improve for the next time. They did really well on the assignment though and I appreciated them putting the effort in and doing a good job on it.

Something new that I got to do today was go into the 7th grade class with the english teacher because she wanted help with "Brain Break" (something that's fun for a couple minutes so that they can chill out) and also grade journals. The game I played with the 7th graders was heads up seven up. They had never heard of this game so I had to explain it to them. They had so much fun playing this game that they asked the teacher for me to come back and play it with them again. They cool thing that I saw through this game was how involved EVERYONE was. It was interesting because the thing you have to do is touch someones thumb in order for them to get a chance to switch places with them. The cool thing was is that out of 17 people in the class, no one was left out. All the kids made sure everyone was included and each person got a turn. I think that is so interesting because in America when playing this many people just pick their friends and not everyone is included. Here though, the kids are just so mindful of everyone around them. It's so sweet and it made me so happy to see everyone being involved.

After playing heads up seven up, the teacher of the class taught the lesson while I graded some journal entries that the kids wrote. They are able to write about anything they want as long as it's one page. The purpose of this journal entry is to have them practice writing in English and correct mistakes from previous entries. It is also a log to see improvement of their writing. The journal entries were really interesting to read and you could tell that some needed a little more help then others. However, there was one journal entry that specifically stood out to me. She wrote about God. She wrote about the love she has for Him and how he has helped her family through extremely hard things (things no kids should have to deal with). She talked about how she believed that being poor was just God's plan and that she trusts whatever He throws at her. It was absolutely amazing hearing this kid speak about God. She spoke about Him as a friend. I think it's just so cool to see all these horrible problems that has happened in her life and with her family, and even after that she is still so close with God. I think I can learn so much from this. There are so many times in life that me, and I'm sure so many others, feel so defeated and just are frustrated with God that something would ever happen to them. However, seeing that this kid has had such a hard time and is still stronger then ever is so inspiring to me. There is so much we can learn from this little girl.

During the last two periods of the day, I sat down with the Reading and Writing teacher and helped plan lesson plans for next week for 6th and 7th graders since I am now in charge of all of 6th grade and English for the 7th grade. My teacher threw me in for a loop and said that I will be in charge of the Reading and Writing classes for 6th and 7th grade next week, meaning I will be teaching it. I am SO excited. I am going to take this opportunity and really learn from it and have fun with it. Needless to say, I have a lot of work to do this weekend with the lessons. Welcome to the teaching world (: After school, we hung out until dinner and then helped bring our supplies and foods for the rural schools inside. It's insane how much we got for the kids. We raised over 1,000 dollars for them so we bought things that they would really need. Tuesday and Thursday of next week we will be traveling to two rural schools to do an art project with them. I don't want to say that rasing 1,000 dollars for the schools help them in any tremendous way. They are still struggling and it doesn't fix anything for their country, however, giving them something for to eat for even a couple days keeps them going for a couple days. I don't by any means think that I am helping Honduras at all. They need someone so much greater than me, and the only person that can help them is God. I just have to leave it up to Him to help them.

Below is the photo of my classroom where I spend most my time at (;