Pen Pal Project... continued.

15 February 2012

Once again, my kids were working away at their pen pal letters to the United States.

I'm still getting loads of questions from the kids...

My favorite--albeit the most infuriating--question has been: "Cuando mandas estas cartas a Inglaterra..." (When you send these letters to England...). I stop that question with a wave of my hand and a "First of all, these letters (finger wag) AREN'T going to (point to the map of England) England. I'm AMERICAN and they are going (point to the map of the United States) my home in the United States..." Then, I answer the rest of their question.

I'm just hoping that by the end of the year the kids really understand that England and the United States are not the same country.

Clearly, I have a long way to go since I saw that a few of the kids have drawn the English flag on their letters.

We've also had our fair share of comic moments.

Today while writing our pen pal letters, I was correcting a 3rd grader's letters when I realized that he had written his last name wrong.

He had written Juan García Greenfield*. He had accidentally wrote my last name as his second last name.

So I asked him, "Juan, are we related?"

He looked really confused and said, "No somos parientes." (We're not related)

Me: "You wrote Greenfield as your second last name."

He looked down at his paper, clapped his hand to his forehead, and said, "Dios mio." (Oh my God!)

Poor guy. He was so embarrassed by his mistake!

In any other class, he would have corrected the mistake and moved on, but everyone started teasing him. It was whispered one student to another until everyone in the class had heard about Juan's mistake. 


*I've changed the name of the student in order to protect his identity.