Visiting a Chilean primary school
Last week, my brother and I spent a day visiting a Chilean primary school. Why visit a school in another country you may be thinking? Let’s rewind to about two months ago before we spent time in the south of Chile and Patagonia. As you know if you have been following along and keeping up to date on my blogs, you would have heard me talk about our friends Megan and Caro. We were talking to them and somehow visiting the school Megan works at came up in conversation. Everyone thought it was a good idea, so we started setting the wheels in motion. Megan had a chat with her school, and we gave our availability. We were not able to do it before heading to Patagonia because the school had other things going on at that time, but we knew we were going to be back in Valparaiso after Patagonia.
What did we do at the school?
For a day, we visited the school, and we helped out a little. We educated the kids what it is like to live in Australia and help them use and develop their English language skills. There were a couple of teachers at the school that spoke some English, and if they did not then Megan would be a translator for certain words that we may not have understood.
This was going to be an adventurous day. We had to wake up early however in the morning before we even left the house, we had a small issue at home - no power! We checked the wall sockets and checked that one of the power points hadn’t tripped the circuit breaker. The breakers all looked fine, so we contacted the owner, who said he would send some tradesmen to come and fix it later in the day. More on this later. We still needed to leave the house on time to get the train into the Valparaiso city centre, and then the “collectivo*” to the school at smaller town outside the city (* a collectivo is like a taxi but you share it with other passengers. You only pay for your seat, and it has certain stops, going to a set destination – a bit like a bus with some flexibility that you can pay them more to drop you at a certain place in the area they drive through). At 7 am we met up with Megan, boarded the collectivo and off we went.
Once we arrived at the school we got introduced to the teachers. The first class we got to join that day was Megan’s class which is the equivalent to kindergarten in Australia. We got to help them do the weekly planner, as well as help them start their new topic on animals and doing a class mind-map of things they want to learn in their new topic. As they were starting new material, the students drew pictures of their favourite animals, and we joined in.
After recess we joined Megan’s class for sport where we got to participate in the games and meet the sports teacher. I also got to read an English language kids book to them. The thing that helped was that I knew this book very well, it was my favourite book when I was little, and it’s written by an Australian author. It is called ‘Where is the Green Sheep’, by Mem Fox.
Reading a book to a group of kids was interesting as I never thought I was going to read a book out loud in public. As some of you may-or-may not know, I am severely dyslexic. If you told me a couple of years ago that I would be either reading a book to a group of children. Or that I would be writing a weekly blog about my travels around the world, I would have thought you were out of your mind because I would have never seen my self-writing voluntary as a hobby.
During the day, the English teacher allowed us to join and assist her in her classes. We first visited her Year 2 class, where the children learned about what is in a pencil case. The teacher told the kids that my brother and I didn’t know what was in a pencil case either, or the kids should help us figure it out. We just went with the joke! They had a song about what is in a pencil case. There was one thing that kept tricking my brain - they were teaching the kids American English, so they were learning to say eraser instead of rubber as we do back home.
We also got the opportunity to join the English teacher in her Year 4 class. This was my favourite class I visited because the kids understood where Australia is in relation to Chile, they also knew some stereotypes about Australia. We were introduced to the class as Megan´s friends from Australia and the kids could ask us questions. These year 4 kids were old enough to ask us good questions and when they ran out of questions to ask, they looked some up in their English books.
Once all the kids had gone home, there were just teaching staff left. Some of the staff members we had a chat to earlier in the day generously gifted us some Chilean lollies that they had bought in one of their breaks, because they wanted us to try something very Chilean. The lollies were really good, and I was grateful for their generosity towards us.
During our journey back home, we were getting messages from Mum warning that there was a bunch of electricians at our house – be ready for some excitement! When we walked in the door, we were met by the owner, a basic electrician, and a specialist electrician with three other people inside the small 2-bedroom apartment. So we had a full house after a big day at school, an hour train ride in either direction, and 45 minutes each way in the collectivo!
I think the school visit was a very good experience, in that we learned a little about their culture, and it was a bit of work experience in another country. We even increased our Spanish language skills. We communicated in broken not-so-good Spanish, and their limited English. Although I definitely say that their English was better than the Spanish we have been gaining over the last four and a half months.
