We had another busy but fun day today, focusing on education.  We got to sleep in a little later and had breakfast at 8:30, before coming back to the hostal for our education seminar.  We talked a lot about the importance of education and the differences between education in the United States and Nicaragua.  We had a lot of questions that we were excited to investigate today!

We started by going to a primary school that was created for the children of the people who work in the dump, so that as small children, they wouldn’t also have to be working at the dump.  We saw the school and were introduced to all of the students; they are so cute!  Many of them were shy but they opened up when it was time to play and we were able to jump rope, throw frisbees, and play soccer with them.  We also brought a Diego pinata that they LOVED.  They not only got all of the candy out of the pinata, but continued to attack poor Diego, fighting over his head and legs!  After saying goodbye, we went up the street to see where they live.  It was hard to see the conditions they live in and we had a really great discussion tonight about what it made us realize about ourselves and our responsibilities as global citizens.

After lunch and a break, we prepared for our first English class!  We were divided into groups based on our Spanish skills so we could communicate with our students, and then we spent some good time preparing our first lesson.  Of course, as soon as we got there and met our students, must of us scrapped our lesson plans and came up with something new on the spot that would help them more!  We all had a great time; for most of us, it was our favorite part of the day!  We are really excited to have time tomorrow to plan better lessons and hang out with our students again.

We ended the day, as usual, with dinner and our nightly meeting.  We had a really good discussion about all of the things we experienced today and were excited to hand off the leadership torch to our first student leader: Winnie!

Winnie will be blogging about our day tomorrow, when we are shadowing high school students!  Until then, we love you and miss you, but we’re having a great time!

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Teaching English to the beginner students.

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Getting ready for our English classes.

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At the school with all of the kids!