Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Olivia H. ILR'20: Teaching English and Compiling HR Manual

-->
          I had the amazing opportunity to participate in two projects for SVYM.  My first project consisted of designing games and songs to promote English in the Viveka Tribal Center for Learning. I used appropriate camp songs and nursery rhymes and modified areas that were not relevant or known.  For example, one of the songs was about a moose, which is an animal that exists in North America, so I changed it to goose to make it easier to understand.  For the games, I used ESL classroom styles to formulate my ideas.  ESL stands for English as a Second Language, and it is different from learning another language as an English-speaker like when you learned Spanish or French in high school.  It aims to incorporate the children’s backgrounds and identities into the material, use bilingual lesson plans so the students are understanding contextual material instead of repeating English words, and it also capitalizes on specific learning styles the children are interested in.  In the tribal school, a lot of the students enjoyed activities in the art field, like painting, dancing, music, drama, etc.  Pictionary is a game that capitalized on those skills while encouraging students to use English terms and thought processes to determine what is being drawn.  My second project was creating a HR Manual for Hosahalli.  There was already a large manual for all of SVYM, but the school wanted a manual that was specifically for them and formatted in a way where it is easy to navigate.  I typed up the 83-page manual, excluding irrelevant information and adding specifics about the school, and organized it by different sections with a table of contents.  The hardest part of this experience, besides saying goodbye, was curtailing my games to be easier or harder based on the reactions from the class.  I had an incredible time, and I hope that my path eventually crosses with SVYM’s again after I graduate.