Day 7: Volunteering in China

By today (our third day of working with LAC), it started to feel pretty normal waking up and then teaching. We had been able to get to know our students a little more over the last couple of days so we were able to teach them and they were able to understand more of what we tried to help them understand. Today’s lesson covered sports which ranged from ones common in China (table tennis) to American sports like football and hockey. We were able to find a couple of videos for football, hockey, and snowboarding which the students really enjoyed, especially the fast paced goals and hits in hockey. We also taught them about baseball but since we didn’t have a video, we had a harder time explaining how it is played. But we made a “baseball” out of paper and used an empty water bottle as a bat and successfully played a 1-inning game. When we finished the English lesson, the students all said their favorite new sport was baseball.

Lunch was delicious as always and afterwards, Yijia, Luke and I went to the convenience store below the cafeteria and bought popsicles. A couple of the other EGLers also got popsicles and Keith’s lemon popsicle sounded really interesting since it contained raisins and vaguely tasted like bananas.

During Industrial Packaging class, each team finished their prototypes. It was great to see how much progress they had made and it felt particularly rewarding because by today Luke and I had made good progress overcoming the language barrier so students were able to ask us questions and we were able to give them answers.

After that class was over, the students wanted to play an American game so we taught them musical chairs. The computers in the classroom already had an eclectic collection of music, so we played the game with music from the Black Eyed Peas, Cascada, Cody Simpson, and even the Carpenters. The kids thought the game was great and we played at least four times.

At dinner we had a potato and beef dish which everyone really liked and afterwards headed to the office to plan tomorrow’s lesson. While we were planning, we started hearing a jack hammer noise. It got louder and louder until suddenly some small chunks of plaster came crashing down from the ceiling and a drill was poking through the hole. The workers told us they were going to continue drilling for a couple hours so Chen found a different room in the library for us to work in.

Gina and I volunteered to find pictures for the lesson plan so we went to the other office to do so. We were really excited after entering the room and felt a cool blast of air from the air conditioning. While we would have loved to stay longer in this room, once we found the necessary pictures, our day ended and we headed back to the dorm for some much needed sleep.

-Jenette