Analogies

While we were in the schools on Wednesday, we were able to see the differences and similarities between the schools that we're familiar with in the US. Although the students had a hard time understanding what we were asking them at some point, they were surprisingly familiar with the famous athletes that we picked to include in our presentation. As a result they moved more quickly through the lesson plan than we had prepared for, so we adapted our lesson and started to talk about important things about the United States. Before we began our lessons in class, the teacher did a warm up lesson asking the students to write down what the USA and UK stand for as well as the capitals of Canada, USA, and UK. Since they had already gone over the capitals, we asked them to tell us or write our for us what the capital of the USA was. With a little hint, they were able to get to the right answer; after that we attempted to explain that our president lives in Washington DC. At first, they were very confused about what we were trying to explain, but instead of trying to explain it the same way we had previously we asked them if they knew who Havel was. Of course they did, so we drew an analogy explaining that "our Havel" lived in DC. With the scaffolding that we provided them with, they were able to understand something that originally was very confusing to them. Analogies were just one of the types of scaffolding that we discussed in class in addition to how/why question, using models, and reflection.