Mmm... delicioso

I had my first week of lunch club with the traditional classes this week. About twice as many students showed up from traditional classes than the multiage classes. Almost every seat in my classroom was full and that doesn't even happen for some of the classes I actually teach! I was impressed and a little nervous but happy to see the club be so popular. I gave the students the options of either just sitting and chatting and trying it (it: referring to speaking Spanish) or coming up with different topics for each week to talk about. These groups chose to just sit and talk and see where that takes them. It's so funny how each lunch club is so different, yet the introduction of the idea was the same in every class. That just shows you how student personalities really do affect your plans for the day. 


There were a few students in this group that had signed up that made me slightly uneasy. They aren't the best kids in class; they tend to misbehave and not focus all the time and really only speak Spanish when pushed. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that it was those same kids who were trying the hardest to speak Spanish during lunch club. I think that giving them the freedom to talk about whatever they wanted in a relatively unstructured time/setting really allowed these kids to shine and see that Spanish really does actually interest them. It also made their class more fun as I taught their class right after lunch. They were so much more well-behaved and engaged in my class! 


One other fun thing about lunch club this week.... I don't see every student in the upper grades because some are pulled out for speech therapy or ELL help or other needs. One of the girls in particular is a native Spanish speaker and so I think she gets a lot of ELL help. After hearing about lunch club, she came up to me outside the cafeteria and asked it she could join! I was so excited because not only does it give me a chance to get to know a student that I don't teach, it allows her the chance to be proud of her native language. Sometimes native speakers are embarrassed by their first language because it's different than everyone else. Lunch club is really helping to show that speaking another language is cool and awesome and something of which to be proud. I am so happy with where it's going.