Let the extracurriculars begin!

Written by LeighAnne Coble
This week, was a whirlwind of reading stories, studying together, and creating poems.  Here is the ADE high school schedule for extracurricular classes:

Monday: Creative Writing (led by intern Leigh Anne)
Wednesday: Tutoring
Thursday: Spoken-word poetry (led by intern Angeley)
Friday: Soccer

D presents her poem

To kick off the week, creative writing class opened with a five-minute free write, which brought out several interesting ideas.  In such a short amount of time, Jeanca wrote a story with eggs and dragons and other fascinating things out of his imagination (and maybe with a little inspiration from Harry Potter as well.)  Even the free writes that began with "I don't know what to write," opened up into something more creative towards the end of the exercise.  Then the class broke into small groups to read ethnic short stories aloud (Japanese, Celtic, Scandinavian, etc.), and gave a presentation about the summary, their favorite part, and what made the story creative.

On Wednesday, tutoring began with a quiz (you can imagine the groans that this elicited,) for each student to understand their learning type: visual, auditory, kinesthetic.  Frances gave suggestions for each learning type to play to his/her strength, offering study techniques like walking around reading the text for kinesthetic learners or reading the text aloud for auditory learners.  Then they broke into groups to study different subjects for the remainder of the hour.

The students write positive words on each other's posters.

In spoken-word poetry on Thursday, Angeley began by taping up posters with the outline of a face and labeled with everyone's name.  As we all ran around writing positive words like "especial," "amable," and "inteligente" on each poster, we began to better understand the power of language.  After five minutes, Angeley called us back to the center of the room, asking us to find our own poster and write kind words about ourselves to self-reflect and build self-esteem.  All of us stood, our face looking into  our poster face, beginning to realize not only the good others see in us but also the good we see in ourselves.  Then, we used the words on our posters to form a poem, and several brave souls read theirs aloud to the class.  At the request of the students, Angeley agreed to recite her fast-beat rhythmic poem, blending cultures and mixing Spanish and English (check it out on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ADE/240241896862?ref=ts).  The students left class with posters in hand and phrases from Angeley's poem, like "Arroz con todo," and "multi-cultured, multi-faceted diva" echoing pleasantly in their ears.

And today is a favorite extracurricular among the students... fútbol!  Looking back on the time we spent on extracurricular classes, week one feels very much like a success.

  Showing their "faces" of kind words.