Yes, the photo is blurry, but it doesn’t make it any less meaningful. This is my team of Auxiliaries and me at our school, probably a month into the position. I remember feeling so incredibly excited for this opportunity to actually teach and learn alongside young learners who wanted to know about the world just as much as I did. My students were as enthusiastic as I was to be there and it fueled my passion for knowledge and language every day. I’ve been in my position for 4 months now, and I am so happy with where I am and what I do.
My contributions to the Language Assistant program, hopefully, include my passion, organization, and excitement to be a part of something so great. Also probably this entire portfolio and organized resources made available to the other language assistants. I hope that when my students look back at their time in school that they remember that silly, fun, and adventurous Language Assistant in their class from the States and remember how big the world is and that it’s just waiting for them to explore it. I hope that they welcome the idea of the unknown and embrace it with the curiosity that they embrace everyday with. My contributions were laughs, songs, games, and an immortalized video of me dressed as a skeleton dancing with them doing a silly Halloween dance.
The highlights for me were really all of us coming together during the holidays. I very much enjoyed my time sharing Halloween and Thanksgiving with my classes. It was during these times that I saw their excitement the most and that made me excited for my day, too. My young learners weren’t there to learn grammar, since they were 5 years old, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t learn cultural concepts. And I hope a highlight for them is knowing someone from the United States and having a positive impression. It’s interesting knowing that you represent a whole country for someone, let alone 100 plus little someones, but I feel that I did an alright job at it.
Overall, my reflection and takeaway from my time as a Language Assistant is to relax and trust in the fact that the students are just as excited to have you there as you are to be there. Also, to not take yourself so seriously. My first week there, I wore a black blazer the entire time. Not to say anything against black blazers, but let me tell you, the 3 year olds got a kick out of my fancy buttons, but that didn’t stop them from sitting in my lap and getting paint all over my clothes. Nothing dresses you down more than spending long periods of your day with very young children who are just learning how to wash their hands.
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a Wilde Explorer 