dialogue journals /or/ the awesomeness of my students!

I've just passed the 1/2 way mark with the first of 3 "winter camps" that I am teaching. This round there are 20 middle school students, about 13-14 years old, separated into two classes. I am teaching writing and grammar, two subjects which ALL students find incredibly interesting and fun (that was sarcasm).

My students are golden. I gave each of them a little notebook at the beginning of class, and I give them about 5-10 minutes in class to write in their journal. I then collect the journals, take them home, and write back... it's kind of a conversation (thus the name "dialogue journals") and they can write without fear of being told they're wrong about things, I will only correct global errors that are recurring. I love it! They are writing more and more each time - the progression in almost all students is noticable! Some students even ask to take the journals home because they want to write more than what they got to in class... that's right, they're actually volunteering for homework! And we're really getting the opportunity to develop relationships with each other through these journals. I can see why this is a popular method in North American ESL classrooms, to increase fluency and communicative comfort! It is so much easier to teach in a classroom when you're able to get to know your students like this. And they are voluntarily writing, some of them up to 1/2 a page a day! WOOT!

So I just wanted to share how wonderful my current batch of students are - an opinion that I feel I can offer validly because through this exercise we are getting to know each other outside the classroom too... I will be sad to see them go (in two days *sob*) but I hope that in our short class time, they were able to really experience English as something not just theoretical - it is an interactive means of communication between people.

I know this is cheesy, but it's things like this that really reaffirm my decision to come over here to teach for a while. I look forward to doing this exercise with my regular after-school conversation classes in the new year, too. The extra work this project creates for me is well-worth it - and fun!