Cultural Exchange has continued. We have now done two additional sessions, and they have been a mixed bag from my perspective.
The first one was about Halloween, which we did on November second. We went over some of the history and traditions of Halloween, and did a bingo activity with common halloween costumes. That went pretty well, although there was one funny moment when Ms. Nathalie had to remind me that pumpkins only grow in Autumn in the US.
That was just the opening of the Halloween session, though. The main event was a trick or treating activity at the end. We had thought about having them make masks, but that plan got abandoned. The trick or treating was something of a Debacle. I won’t focus on it here because it worked out well enough, but there wasn’t enough communication between the groups so many of the teachers we had worked with to have candy to hand out were all out by the time my group got there. That was disappointing and frustrating because it meant we walked all over the school for ultimately no reason, but there was some candy which counts for something. I actually got overwhelmed and went back to the classroom early, which was good for me.
Ahead of the next session, I resolved to make sure that didn’t happen. I didn’t want to do Halloween for the second group, because that would end up being two weeks later which I thought was too far from Halloween for that to make sense. I briefly considered doing Thanksgiving instead, but as I am one of the only Americans in the program I thought that wouldn’t work very well. Matthew’s group wouldn’t have much to say about it.
Ultimately, I thought of talking about the Weather and the Seasons. This could be more interactive with the rural students because the Seasons in Sri Lanka are different than in the US, so we could talk to them about it. Additionally, weather is a fairly common type of vocabulary so it would be useful to go over it. We could also get just barely into numbers by talking about temperature, which was nice.
Cultural Exchange Weather Slideshow
I made a slideshow to go over the vocabulary with some images to explain, and Matthew made a Kahoot (multiple choice questions game) to go over the content covered in class. He also made the theming of the slideshow more visual, which was helpful.
On the day of (Yesterday when I am writing this) we brought the kids straight up to Ms. Nathalie’s room, which was a change in format we had made for the Halloween session. Now there is no introduction section and we divide them into groups in the cafeteria itself.
We couldn’t get the projector working initially, so we had to put Aran’s laptop on a chair and sit on the floor in a circle, which actually worked pretty well. We moved through the vocabulary presentation section very fast, which is a lesson I will take into account for planning in the future. We got to our first activity okay, which was incredibly awkward as I had to prompt the rural students very often. What it was was showing them a Map of the UK with the weather listed for various cities and asking them what the weather was in a given city. It worked well enough in the end, although communicating what “Partly cloudy” means and when to use it ended up being a lost cause.
We then got into the seasons and I had to hold myself back from explaining the biology of why leaves change color. It went pretty well, although when I asked about how seasons worked in Sri Lanka, none of the rural students would answer and Aran ended up talking about the monsoon.
During the presentation, Aran and I achieved a sort of dynamic. I enjoy presenting, and I can project and draw attention pretty well, but when it comes to explaining or breaking something down I freeze like a deer in headlights. How it worked out was I would give the presentation and the vocabulary, and he would interject to explain smaller details when people got confused. We were very much making it up as we went along, but I think it ended up working out.
In the end we launched the Kahoot. Aran and one of the other students took out their laptops and joined the Kahoot, which was projected on the board. The named themselves “Team Sunny” and “Team Rainy” which was a fun gimmick. They got confused by the wording in some of Matthew’s questions, but we got there in the end. There was one unique moment where they didn’t understand what Autumn was (the picture was of a child playing in a pile of fallen leaves and one group picked summer and the other spring) and I explained about the leaves falling again, so hopefully they think of it as some weird thing that happens in the US.
We finished a couple minutes late and the other group were at the busses before us, but I consider this day a success. We will give the same presentation again next week, and then in december a presentation about the Winter Holidays which I am presently drafting.
I think that the Cultural Exchange group is really going somewhere now. We are learning the ropes which is great to see.