Nontraditional Family Members

My little darlings just finished their “Family” unit in Basic English and we did some more cool projects that I want to share with you! My students often surprise me with their creativity and when they choose to use it – some projects or assignments that I think they will love they only spend 3 minutes scribbling something down, while others that I think are mediocre they devour and produce the most beautiful creations. As well, I always seem to struggle with designing projects that are at their level – they can either handle the directions easy peesy or I find myself surrounded by little ducklings begging me to do everything for them. These two assignments turned out to be successful in both areas and my students made me very proud with their final products!

Fingerprint Families: One of the problems with teaching “family” vocab here in La Unión is that my students have ridiculous families. Everyone is somehow related to everyone because they have countless aunts, uncles, and cousins. You would need a billboard to map out their family trees! So for this project I limited who they had to include to those who lived in the same house as them. Each student had to stamp their finger prints on a paper and turn those finger prints into people in their families! Unfortunately I did not get any photos of what they created before they ran home with their pictures, but here is mine (and it wasn’t even the best looking one out of the bunch!):

Magazine Families: This one was really fun to watch my students piece together new families. I put all my kiddos into groups and pre-ripped out (to avoid any awkward or scandalous advertisements) an assortment of pictures of people from magazines and they all had to leaf through them, cut out the people, and create a new family! They glued the pictures to a poster paper and labeled each person with the vocabulary word that would describe this person’s new position in our 3^rd grade classroom families. They giggled the whole time and had fun choosing their new family members!

Please be praying for some 12^th graders this week as they await responses from universities in the States about scholarships. Darwin is waiting to hear from Kuyper College (Michigan) about a full ride. Kevin, Nelson, and Lucely are waiting to hear from Hope College (Michigan) about more money, a full tuition, or a full ride to the school. And Darwin, Nelson, and Nelsy have second interviews with the Walton International Scholarship Program for a possible full ride with extra perks to one of three schools in Arkansas. Pray for them by name, that they would be filled with patience as they eagerly wait to hear back and that they trust fully in the Lord during this time. God is beginning to reveal their futures to them and I pray that they are ready to faithfully follow His plans!