Talk about motivation!

This is an example of the posters that were spread all over the South Range Elementary School's walls. Although they may seem like just posters - even annoyingly cheerful ones for an incredulous Finn - their influence can be felt on the school's mood. Things will work out if you have faith in them and when you have positive attitude the work is almost done. The support and positive feedback we as students got from the teachers at the school made us try even harder and do our best!

In Finland we success in PISA surveys, but student's don't like being in school. In my opinion it's just because of the attitude and expectations that school's supposed to be boring and tiring. There could be use for some positiveness in Finland too, maybe that's the thing that could make the school more enjoyable. Think about combining this wonderful attitude and praised Finnish school system - nothing could beat it!

 

...and learning English!

For English skills, this type of practical training is priceless! It's wonderful feeling when I noticed my speaking of English changed from translating Finnish sentences to thinking in English. That's something you can't avoid when staying more than a week abroad. If we had stayed any longer, I wonder if we would have started sounding like real yoopers. *
  

Teaching in English sounded like impossible thing to do when we were doing our plans in Finland with Eeva. Being a teacher is not a piece of cake with one's own language, so how could it be even possible to manage it in English! Well, it just is. 3rd graders don't care if your English isn't perfect, their is not either! Actually when put in proportion, Finnish university students have studied English longer than the 3rd graders (8-year-olds) have lived. And I will assure you, if you admit you don't understand some word one of the children is using, they're eager to explain it to you with other words or just gestures! So, it's learning both ways around and it's something you can't experience any other way. 

There's only one thing to do to enhance the language before traveling to the US, and that's just to unpack the thought of trying to speak English like a native. Not one person will blame you for speaking "bad English" there, people are actually just amazed that you can speak it even a little. So English is not an excuse not travel!

*  The word "yooper" means a person living in the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan. The yooper  dialect has a lot of impact from Scandinavian languages among others, which makes it unique - and sometimes difficult to understand!

The Yooper Land. Picture from the website: http://dayoopers.com/whatwher.html.

Teaching Finnish

Something we were not prepared to when starting the teaching at the South Range, was the children's enormous enthusiasm to learn Finnish. It was impossible to predict that they would be so into learning a language that only 5 million people in the world speak far away in Europe. That's something that we thought wouldn't happen, just based on experiences in our own country.

In Finland learning languages is self-clear and almost taken for granted. We start studying English at the age of 9 and Swedish at the age of 13, and many students study more than that as voluntary subjects. It's no more exotic or glamorous that you know other languages than your own.

But with the South Range's 3rd graders it was different. Right away when we arrived to class there was questions flying in the air: "What is dog in Finnish? How do you say thank you? What's "backbag?" Some of students knew some Finnish words because of their heritage; makkara, pannukakku and sisu are familiar for them. And when me and Eeva had a quiet conversation in Finnish in the class when we thought no-one's listening, the children just stared at us enchanted. That was one of the times we had to change our plans - we realized we have to fulfil their expectations and teach some Finnish. And we could've done more of that, just for future student's to know.

Teaching Finnish is not easy though, the pronunciation is almost impossible first for other than Finnish people. We heard approximately 5000 versions of saying the Finnish "R" and even easier words were hardly understandable. But most important thing was that the students actually wanted to learn, they practiced Finnish and enjoyed it.

We are not Finnish language teachers, so we tried to do our best to motivate the students in learning new languages. One thing that was fun to all of us was to give everyone a Finnish name! Hunter turned into Heikki, Molly became Maija and the classe's teacher Mr. Aho changed smoothly from Steve to Teuvo. 

Body parts were learned through familiar song to American and Finnish children, check the link from here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faOAF0F2OA8