Calle Hernandez Primary School

Recently we had the opportunity to travel to the Calle Hernandez primary school which is a public school here in Heredia. This rural school is the equivalency of a Title One school and holds 100-150 students. During our visit we spent time in Dina Villalobos’ English classroom.

Dina has been teaching English for over 20 years. She grew up in a missionary family and was taught English growing up in Brazil.

While at Calle Hernandez, we helped two different classes. The first group was a class of fifth grade students. These students were writing letters to their pin pals so we were there to help them with new vocabulary to use, check grammar and spelling, etc. It was kind of fun because Dina reminded me of one of my favorite Spanish teachers, Mrs. Pettenger. Dina wants the students to learn by demonstration not by translation. Therefore, when I taught new vocabulary, I had to act it out and say it in English for them to get what I was saying. Never once did I say the word in Spanish. I was laughed at a lot, but it’s whatever—I’m used to that.

The next group of students we helped were in the third grade. We played games with these kids to help prepare for their spelling bee that was coming up. My group played Matamoscas or Flyswatter. I also had the advanced spellers in my group; one moved to Costa Rica from the United States so he was very far ahead in his English comprehension, the other little girl transferred from a private school where she received four lessons of English a week. Overall, flyswatter was a successful activity, but since these children are so advanced they became bored very easily and we had this game to play for at least 45 minutes.

We also got to tour the school grounds which with less than 150 students, there wasn’t much to view. It was very simplistic, but they did have brand new computers which I found very surprising. I’m not saying that I pictured the schools in Costa Rica to be impoverished, but in this rural area with so little students I wasn’t expecting computers. I was only able to view Dina’s classroom and view a little bit of the physical education class due to teacher strikes in the country, but it was a good visit to our first school.