¡Felices Fiestas!

Wishing you the very best during this holiday season

from our family to yours.

Casa HOY is funded in part by
donations from people like you. 

Please remember Casa HOY 

in your year-end giving.

Please click the link to make a donation via Paypal

or you can send a check, made out to "Por un mejor HOY," to the address below:

c/o Rebecca Barnhart

535 North Griffith Park Drive

Burbank, CA 91506

ENGLISH-TEACHING HICCUPS

Expect the unexpected and embrace the discomfort. Just two weeks of learning to be flexible outside of your comfort zone will seriously change your outlook on life--for the better.
 
No pencils. No paper. No copy machine. No markers. A whiteboard that won’t erase. That’s what a classroom with need looks like in Mexico. Oh, and it might not be a classroom. It might be a covered patio with mismatched chairs, a cramped playroom with broken toys and tattered books, or the funky smelling cafeteria.
And that’s just the beginning. Teaching English as a volunteer is nothing like teaching English programs in a foreign country in a paid setting. Your students most likely will not have an English curriculum, will not be at grade level in their regular subjects, let alone English, and won’t have the family/moral support necessary for a healthy learning environment. At Casa HOY we prepare volunteers for these very likely situations. Even when volunteers are armed with all of this knowledge, it is still can be a shock to enter your English teaching placement here in Cuernavaca or neighboring cities in the state of Morelos.
At our new project, a “casa hogar,” or foster-care home, in a nice neighborhood in the municipality of Temixco, our volunteers are fortunate enough to have a more academic setting. Desks with seats, a large whiteboard, and some kids with notebooks. What a relief. Although the ages range from 5 to 10, boys and girls, most kids have only a few words of English. And even though they’ve been taught English in the past, as obvious from a few random child-made posters of prepositions on the walls, there is no lesson plan to follow.
As recommended, our first day we went prepared to review colors and teach body parts. A veteran volunteer taught us the color song, which reviews colors in English and Spanish. After 10 weeks of volunteering with Casa HOY, she has quite a list of activities up her sleeve. The kids actually knew their colors pretty well, so we moved on to body parts. Head, shoulders, knees and toes is always a favorite, singing it slowly then picking up pace in each round. The children drew a body, working off of another volunteer’s drawing on the board.
The second day we focused on shapes. In order to review, we had kids do a scavenger hunt going out to find examples of each shape. Most kids really got into it, and for their partner presentation we were shown balls, parts of doors, toys and other random objects found around the playground. Although volunteers are only expected to give an hour of English, we ended up entertaining them (through teaching, of course) for an hour and a half. Afterward they had us running around playing hide-and-seek, hangman and yoga.
Hiccups we’ve encountered thus far are the fact that some other volunteers who teach the kids arts and crafts have come while we’re supposed to be teaching. That interrupts us and distracts the children. Or maybe children haven't had lunch yet when we get there. That gives you time to review your lesson plan, or to sit down with the kids and bond over dinner table conversation. Or, for example, although we’ve created an English only classroom, it is still complicated when children start babbling about something and you have no idea what they’re saying. Many volunteers find it very difficult to communicate if they have no Spanish. This is an opportunity for you to get creative and a chance to take you out of your comfort zone. Talk to Casa HOY staff and other volunteers for tips on communicating. It also helps to write down a list of words that you think you will need during your day, such as basic greetings or vocabulary that you plan on teaching.

TIPS FOR TEACHING ENGLISH

It's almost summer, which means an influx of volunteers from around the globe will be coming to Casa HOY to help out with our many different projects. One of the themes we offer is Teaching English. Placement options include schools and foster care centers, with children or with teenagers. You might be in a structured setting with another teacher or with a little more freedom on your own/with other volunteers.

Whatever your situation may be, we've compiled a list of tips that we at Casa HOY think is important for your Teaching volunteer experience. It's a long list, so take what you need and add your own ideas.
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PLAN! Plan more activities than what you have time for. With a two-second lull you can lose their attention and interest.

Activities should be planned in 20-minute blocks; their attention span won’t go much beyond that.

Encourage every student to participate. If they’re shy, call on them. Or, have students work with partners or in groups.

Try your best to learn all of their names. It will make it easier for you to manage the class and get students to participate. If you’re there for an extended period of time, have them write down their name and a few interesting facts about themselves (what they like to do/eat/play, but NOT where they live or about family).

Make a lesson plan for each day, and for each week. Tie everything together with a theme for the week.
What is your objective for the activity? The day? The week?

Try scaffolding: Build on each activity, don’t just choose random topics. Example: Theme: Food. Day 1, Vocabulary; Day 2, Restaurant; Day 3, Ordering Food, Questions/Answers etc.

Think of topics they can relate to: find out their musical interests, favorite soccer players, favorite food, technology, Facebook, movies, places to visit in Morelos (or wherever you're teaching), fashion, culture, family.

Typical format for a one-hour class: Review from the previous day (10 minutes), A warm-up (5 minutes), The information (20 minutes), Practice activity in a group (a game or worksheet) (15 minutes), Individual practice (a game, worksheet, partner practice, skits) (10 minutes)

NEVER leave materials with students- only worksheets. Do not let students keep pencils, markers, scissors, NOTHING. If you wish to make a donation to the school, give it to the teacher you are helping, the school director or the Casa HOY staff member you are with.

Slow down. Take it easy. Don’t use many phrasal verbs or vocabulary that is super unique to your country. No "bad" words or offensive language.

Have more than enough copies and materials for everyone.

Learn about your placement. How many students? Boys/girls? What is their English level? What is their general family background? Ages?

Learn the curriculum. Talk with your teacher or Casa HOY staff for guidance and to know what the teacher expects.

Be prepared for a lack of discipline. Discipline is the school’s job. Defer to a teacher or Casa HOY staff member. However, be strict. You don’t want to undermine the teacher. Learn the class rules.

Ask teacher/staff if you can give out rewards for participation and games. Good rewards are pencils, stickers and erasers. Try to steer away from candy.

Games include: competitions, fly-swatters (hitting the correct word on the board), charades, hang-man, I Spy, categories, running up to the board to write the correct word, etc. Talk to other volunteers for more ideas, and spend some time at an Internet cafe looking up activities.

Don't talk to students about drinking, partying, or your personal relationships.

No cell phones or pictures during class.

IDEALISM: UPS AND DOWNS, HIGHS AND LOWS

Check out some thoughts on the volunteer experience, shared by Cindy, longtime HOY volunteer...

For international participants it can sometimes be a shock to enter the educational/childcare system in Mexico. We advise Casa HOY participants not to take things too seriously and to be prepared for a lack of, well, everything. Little or no discipline, lack of school supplies or technology, an overworked and perhaps undertrained staff, as well as limited, dirty and/or cramped facilities. Children and teenagers’ belongings and preparedness will also differ, some having a high level of English and/or nice, clean clothes, and others with only a broken pencil to their name (and of course, no eraser).

Even though Casa HOY coaches participants in preparation for these cultural differences, volunteers inevitably come with idealistic expectations for their community experience. You may think: I’m one more person, I can help with discipline. Or, I have some extra money, I can buy supplies that they will use and value. Or, I have time, I can give them the individual care and attention they need. And hopefully, most of the time, that will be the case.

Let's be realistic, though. Throughout your volunteer experience you will have up days and down days. That's part of the experience.

I had an “idealistic” day like that today at an organization where I’ve been helping off and on for the past five years. Now that I speak Spanish fluently, I feel a responsibility to help out with discipline, especially knowing that the staff there is overworked and, as we say in Spanish, probably “hasta la madre” (they’ve had it “up to here”). The boys were picking on a fellow compañero with some physical and mental disabilities, and I, for the life of me, could not get them to leave him alone. The staff didn’t discipline, and of course the boys didn’t pay any attention to me. So much for my idealistic expectations.

When we left our volunteer work for the day, I exploded, distraught with the negative treatment the boy was receiving and “hasta la madre” with the lack of discipline, interest/care and resources. But yet again, as other Casa HOY staff consoled me later in the evening, I was reminded that we are “on the road to change the world.” And sometimes we have to accept the road that we are on-- we can’t change the road and the world.

Remember, Mexico is NOT your home country (even if I now consider it as such). If you compare it to your home country and apply the same expectations you have there for your time here in Mexico, you’re going to come up short. The same standards in the US or Australia, for example, for childcare are totally different in other countries. That's not to say that it’s okay for these problems to exist but rather that they are part of your everyday volunteer experience and you can either harp on them or focus on the positive moments of the convivir part of your participatory travel.

Don’t give up on changing the world just because the world isn’t always ready to change. You might not be able to change the world of an organization, but you might be able to be the change in one person’s world.

Felices Dias y Nuevo Año 2012!

Happy Holidays!

CASA HOY PROUDLY ANNOUNCES PARTNERSHIP WITH IVHQ!

This fall Casa HOY welcomes its first IVHQ-Mexico volunteers since beginning its partnership with the international volunteer agency IVHQ, which operates in 18 different countries, helping thousands of volunteers connect with local organizations and programs.

For more info, please read on….

Casa HOY—based in sunny, quiet Cuernavaca—has teamed up with IVHQ, an international volunteer agency, expanding on HOY's 10-year journey of offering give-and-get travel to individuals and groups.

Casa HOY is IVHQ’s exclusive partner in Mexico and will continue to organize and carry out community service trips for people who are looking for a different type of travel experience.

Through IVHQ, participants will have the opportunity to work with the great network of NGOs and activists that Casa HOY has built up in Cuernavaca and Morelos State. Volunteers can focus on one of four categories:

* Teaching: primarily focused on teaching English, although volunteers can also expect to help with other school subjects. Having the ability to speak English provides Mexicans with an advantage in finding work and building a future career.

* Environment: an opportunity to jump into the thick of Cuernavaca’s diverse environmental scene. Volunteers have direct contact with local projects to raise public awareness and get practical results

* Computer Training: a Cuernavaca-based computer lab on wheels. Every weekday afternoon the lab sets up in selected disadvantaged neighborhoods to provide via an easy-to-follow lesson plan computer related opportunities that otherwise do not exist.

* Childcare: individual and group interaction with children from low-income homes and communities. Volunteers aid local staff in improving the educational, emotional and sanitary conditions in which the children live.

Please come join us in Cuernavaca and spread the word to family and friends.