Sometimes students themselves already make amazing teachers. One of my fifth grade students this year–let’s call him Juan–was a newcomer to the bilingual system. He consistently struggled to respond to the advanced English language content in his Natural Science and Social Science classes, and disliked using comprehension to find answers, preferring instead to find a way to translate the material before responding. In my class’s small group setting, he relied heavily on his classmates to do this for him when we played games or worked on activities in teams. I refused to translate for him, encouraging him to use what he knew to decipher my words and content.
To my delight, his classmates often adopted this technique as well, by challenging him to translate on his own or creating tools that would help him understand on his own. I loved watching them support him and work together to find creative ways to explain all the topics and practice I threw at them. One day, a certain Jorge made this chart for Juan during a game of hangman to help him match the letter shapes to the correctly pronounced English sound. It was a correct, useful, and ingenious creation that I kept on hand for future classes and even showed to my younger students when they struggled with their pronunciation.
Yes, I agreed, the “y” is guay, don’t you think?
Educación in English 