Learning English is so much fun!

While home in Moldova this April, and as I had 3 whole weeks, I decided to teach English voluntarily at the village school in Recea. First I contacted the director, Mrs Valentina Cheptene, and we agreed on the details like where? when? for which grade?. Mrs. Valentina was very happy to collaborate and called it ‘a nobel thing to do’.

The lucky guys were the 8th grade. I went to school twice a week, on Wednesdays and Thursdays. For the class content I did not want to go deep as grammar or essay writing, I know that this requires more time and more intensive work. I had the 7 volumes of Chronicles of Narnia with me at home, so I decided to conduct classes with the topics of these books.

The classes were not obligatory, and not many pupils wanted to join, but I was lucky to have 6 amazing girls from the beginning till the end of the course.

English classes, Recea 2018

Have you ever had the opportunity to teach? What can you say about this experience? For me this was the first time, and in the beginning I was so nervous and literally trembling. For the first class I asked them to play a game in order to meet each one of them, also to check on their level in order to organize myself better.

As I mentioned before, we focused on the books Chronicles of Narnia, mainly on the book – “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. S. Lewis. We had reading exercises, vocabulary, discussions, analyzes, comprehension exercises, listening to the audiobook and also watching part of the movie based on this story. It was very well organized as I would always ask them what they prefer to do, also they were very active and coming with good ideas and proposals. The last day we left for games, we played an improvised heads-up game, that was totally fun.

I enjoyed these classes a whole lot, and I feel like I made a difference. It took me only a couple of minutes to fall in love with these girls, they are so kind, funny, inquisitive, beautiful and creative. They would tell me things that made me think on particular subjects of life, and in the end it felt like a small family of ours. I mean if I got to be so attached to them in only 3 weeks, I cannot imagine what would happen if I had more time.

In my previous post Charity campaign: Childhood with Fairytales I mentioned as well that children are our future and we should invest in them as much as possible. This experience was one of the kind, and I am really glad that I had the courage to do it. It was not only delivering knowledge to the girls, I also learnt a lot. You see many things differently when you stop from your daily chaos and interact with children. The girls asked me if I am a teacher, but the truth is that I never was and never even tried. This is something new that I discovered about myself, not only I loved doing this, also people encouraged me to do it in the future. Thank you girls for our English classes! I will miss you dearly and I hope to see you soon!