4: December – Let’s Chat!

The “Let’s Chat” is the first activity that I started to organize alone using non formal education. It is an hour of games in english for people from eleven to fourteen years old, made with two different group every week. The goal is not to teach english, but to make them practise the knowledge they learned at school. I had different fears at the beginning because my english level is far from perfect and because I was scared of making boring activities. The rule that I gave to myself was to never repeat a game in different session and to always try to organize something new. The first day I spent five hour organizing activities with different level of complexity; during the first session I noticed that I had made different mistakes of evaluation: most of the games where too difficult for the level of the group and had too many rules, and didn’t result funny at the end. The easiest activities, that I tought where the weakest one, resulted to be the one the group enjoyed the most. Day after day the activities started to become better. I understood that I have to organize games for people that are tired after spending the whole day at school, and that have a low attention span.
This group is still going at the moment, and I sperimented different kind of activities; sometimes they got good exit and sometimes not, but I will keep going with this sperimentation. I also noticed that the participant with a lower level of english were unconfortable doing the activity, and this sensation was worst every time I was helping them to play the game, and at the end I solutioned that problem giving them a computer with an online translator. There are many difficulty to face: is it very difficult to manage groups with a great difference of level, and to create entertaining activities for people that can’t speack fluently, but I can say after four months of activity that it is possible to see improvements in their speaking abilities.