Tutoring

One of the activities that the university I’m attending here in Sevilla offers is a chance to tutor for local families who want a native English speaker to work with their children, helping them with their homework and playing games with them while practicing English. On top of that, you get paid (not much, but enough to let me go out on the weekends).

I work with two families. One woman who works at CIEE has a 10-year-old daughter, Clara, that I tutor on Tuesdays for an hour. Clara is very smart, and her mom is fluent in English, so working with her has been a lot of fun. The hard part is coming up with things that are challenging for her. Today, she was singing One Direction songs and I told her we could watch the music videos if she could sing all the words in English. Needless to say, the hour went by pretty fast after that.

The other family I work with on Mondays and Wednesdays has three little girls, one 10-year-old named Lourdes who is also good at English, and two twin six-year-olds named Valentina and Ines who just started learning English. They crack me up, especially Valentina who comes up with new and creative ways to avoid doing her English homework every day. Ines is a complete sweetheart, and always does her work diligently.

Sometimes we do homework the entire time, but a lot of times the girls don’t have English homework, or it only takes a few minutes. My challenge has been coming up with games that can be adjusted for all of their English levels. Clara is by far the most advanced, Lourdes is in the middle, and Valentina and Ines are more elementary. Hangman is a big hit with all of them, and Pictionary is also good since they all love drawing. We read too – Clara is reading Junie B. Jones which is a huge childhood flashback for me. Lourdes just finished Cinderella, which was fun, and now we’re starting Robin Hood. Ines and Valentina are mostly sticking with picture books right now, but they love them and they’re becoming more comfortable reading out loud in English.

I’ve really enjoyed getting to know more Spanish families and working with all four girls. Especially since this is what I did all summer in Haiti, I feel like it was a great chance to continue teaching while practicing my Spanish and learning more about the Spanish school system. I have a little over a month left of tutoring, and I’m excited to see how much more my girls can learn in that time.