Home for 50 Elderly People in Argentina

Once a week we meet up with the elderly people of the Day Care Center to give them an English class. We work in small groups of around four students and try to teach them basic things such as introducing themselves, counting and talking about the weather. We usually start off with revising the content of the previous lesson, then bring an input with new information and to finish the class we play a game to have them practice what they learnt and to make them speak. Furthermore we often end up with cultural discussions by comparing the European culture to the Argentinean one.

As you may imagine improving language skills at this age takes a lot of effort and sometimes it’s hard for them to remember the vocabulary. That’s why we can`t have a high expectation of their improvement but to us it’s already a great success to see them concentrated thinking of language.  Moreover to have them sit together, provide their social interaction and to create a more interesting daily life.

For some of them it’s been a lifelong ambition to learn English and with our class we try to fulfill their wish.
And also for us it’s a joy to see them studying very motivated and with a huge curiosity. As soon as we enter the Center they start greeting us in English and asking about when the class begins. Their ambition and seeing their pleasure of learning is a great experience and satisfaction for us as well.

The activity was based in San José Residence, which is kind of an eldery care home in Ciudadela, near Buenos Aires city. Every day (and every night) all the workers take care of the many residents there, they assist the residents with their hygienic habits, give the medication to them, prepare food, make activities.. Activities like today: Solidary Children

Plenty of children from the school San Miguel went to San José to spend the morning with the residents. The 16 year-old children arrived in the morning and they were interacting with the elderly. In the beginning was a bit of first contact between them, introducing themselves, swaping information like age, nationality, hobbies. At that point some of the children felt a bit shy, not very talkative, but after a few minutes they started to speak more and their corporal language showed that they were more comfortable.

I think it was an interesting interaction, because none of them seem to be in contact with people of the other age, apart from the relatives, and children can learn a lot from elderly and be more empathetic with people at that stage of the life, and for the elderly it is good to be with fresh people, to see new faces, to listen different voices and new stories. Not everything was easy, there were some language barriers, for example: one of the elderly cannot hear so they had to communicate through writing.

At the end of the morning we played bingo all together, which was really funny. It helped to the communication as well, there were plenty of prizes for the winners. To sum up, today was a really interesting and successful day, both sides got positive experiences and they should repeat this quite often.