field trip...to school

Our Spanish teacher's husband, David, has been taking us on field trips recently. He definitively does not speak English which is good for us; he is also incredibly hard to understand which gets confusing. On Tuesday he took us to Leonor Hourticou, a public elementary school. David used to be a schoolteacher and the lovely principal of this school is a former colleague of his.

We got to explore a couple of classrooms and chat with a third-grade teacher (third is Mike's grade). This sounds quite a bit more freely flowing than it felt -- it's so difficult to hear the words someone else is saying, figure out what they mean, and then formulate your own thoughts, and get them out before the conversation has moved on!

Public school kids wear white tunics, kind of like labcoats, with a big floppy blue bow at the neck. Teachers also wear white labcoats, without the bow. The littlest kids wear colored tunics. We had a roomful of 5 year olds in red and white gingham aprons & sleeve covers sing us a song called La Caracol, which I believe means The Snail. Truly adorable.

The school has an organic garden out behind the big patio where kids have recess. The garden functions as an outdoor classroom around which different classes can be structured. The kids are growing beets, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, basil, mint, oregano, marjoram, rosemary, and many flowers.

Kids go to school for 4 hours a day here, either 8 to noon or 1 to 5. In many schools the morning session is one school (has its own name, teachers and principal) and the afternoon session has an entirely different name, set of teachers & principal. The teacher we talked with teaches in the morning at Leonor Hourticou, then travels to another neighborhood to teach in the afternoon. Some other teacher moves into her classroom when Franklin D. Roosevelt (the afternoon school) commences. Both school names have their own very differently styled plaques at the front door. Weird but I guess it works. Our teacher's room had some exercises in English posted up on the walls but she explained that those were done by the afternoon kids & that she doesn't speak or teach any English.