Spreading the good English word

On Tuesday I did my first stint volunteering at a school, helping some grade schoolers who could use some extra attention because they are above the average level of their classmates. The volunteering is organized through my work, so about 10 of us head over every week to work with groups of 2-5 kids and we'll do this for the rest of the school year. I don't go every week, we work in pairs so that we only have to go every other week, often less than that once you count in skipping weeks because of holidays. Some of the volunteers help with math or reading, using workbooks, but my group is English conversation, so we just sit around and talk.

Considering I don't really care for kids, I sort of surprised myself by not only signing up to do this, but finding myself looking forward to it. Maybe I was drawn by the idea of being able to provide a good English-speaking example, if only to a few kids. When you read about recent studies finding that Dutch people overestimate their foreign language skills, not only in English but in German and French as well, and you know that this matches what you hear on pretty much a daily basis, then I guess I did get excited at the opportunity to promote proper English.

In the time leading up to my first visit to the school, I sometimes worried that the idea in my head of how it would go was expecting way too much out of some still rather young kids. I imagined coming in and being able to talk to them, perhaps simply and with some explanations of what words meant, but they'd at least understand me. I was fortunate that my group of four kids are indeed that advanced in their English, so it went rather as I expected it (a fellow volunteer wasn't as lucky and had a group who speak only very basic English, so he was really teaching them as opposed to just talking). What I should have thought about more though was what on earth I was going to talk about for 45 minutes with some 10-11 year olds. I'm not used to this stuff, and the teacher just dropped us into the groups of kids with no direction at all. So our first session had a bit of a rocky start. I asked them their names. I asked their ages. I asked where they live (I live in the same neighbourhood, so I knew where these places were). We did some more small talk about pets and siblings and school activites, but I was hitting a wall and feeling rather silly since I was supposed to be the adult in charge. Fortunately, one of the girls (there's only one boy) suggested we go over colours, so that gave us something a bit more structured to talk about. But they knew their colours, so after a bit of that I was stuck again. But I thought we could do animals, so we ended up spending the rest of the time going through a book of Dutch wildlife and I taught them a lot of words for various animals in there. It was pretty fun and the pictures added another dimension too because they'd go "ewwww" at some freaky spider or caterpillar, or go "oooh" over a neat photo of a bird flying.

I'm planning already for my next session with them in 2 weeks. I definitely need to come better prepared so they don't start to think I'm totally lame for not knowing what to do. I'm thinking of ideas where they tell a story, perhaps about animals to use some of the words they learned. Or to have them talk about their favourite subject or hobbies. In any case I'm really excited and I really like the group I have. Sometimes it was a bit off putting talking to them because their eyes would wander and I would think I was totally boring them, but I think it was just normal kid short attention span, or sometimes they were just thinking of things to ask. It's just something I need to get used to. They were really into looking through the wildlife book though, they kept scooting closer and closer in their chairs, so I just need to find things to engage them with.