I crack myself up sometimes.
• You can convince yourself that just about anything is educational if it involves English. I have griped before about how my kindergarten classes are saddled with sub-standard textbooks that don’t actually have any imformation in them, they’re basically picture books. And I am only allowed to go through about 6 pages a month with them. So I sometimes have to make up new ways to insert vocabulary words into their brains. Enter the thingy:
I don’t really know what these things are called but I figured it would at least get the kids recognizing the spelling of English numbers and foods (their current unit). To get an idea lets give it a whirl. Pick a number. 4? Okay. 1-2-3-4
Now pick a food. Pear? Okay P-E-A-R.
Now pick another food. Strawberries?
Okay and the survey says:
Yeah it all kinda falls apart with the last bit but the kids were enthralled, and treated it like a game they got points on so they would all pick the same food so they could all get “yummy”. I had the class twice today and for the second one they all got to make their own thingies, mainly so they would stop badgering me to play it with them. The director saw me doing this with one of her little walkbys and I have no idea if she approved or not, but compared to the other teachers that just let the kids color half the time I think I can justify the exercise.
• Sometimes even my best class has a bad day. My Galileo class, the kindergarten class full of all the smart nice kids was very somber when I entered the room. No one was playing around they all just had their heads hung and one girl was crying while the rest looked pretty close. Sometimes little arguments happen when teachers aren’t in the room but it is usually forgotten about a minute into class, not this time. It took me a little while to figure out what had happened, they are only 5 and 6 year olds so it almost became a weird combination of a cop drama and esl as I tried to write on the board (in bullet form of course) what they were explaining to me. It took just about everyone in the class contiributing some English to set out the story so I could understand it. Basically the three girls were drawing on the board during playtime with some dryerase markers some teacher had left there. Now at the end of playtime one of the boys erased the board and they all got really mad at him. I tried to talk to the boy and find out why he did it, which I could have already guessed. He always goes nuts when I let him erase the board when I’m done and he always puts away all the toys and books at the end of class. He was really just trying to be a good student, he told me that he just wanted to help ‘clean up’, and that he liked the pictures the girls drew. I tried to explain to the class that Edward was just trying to be good and he didn’t want to make anyone sad. This seemed to mollify the rest of the class but then Edward broke down into horrible sobs. Everyone then gathered around him and patted him and apologized and brought tissues until he had at least fifteen of them. He calmed down after a minute or two, but I gave him (and everyone else) some stickers (which I rarely ever ever do with that particular class- since they are never happy unless everyone gets stickers and I’ve had to ration them for the troubled classes) and a double dose of peach scented hand sanitizer just to make sure everyone was happy. And also because they are one of the classes that makes me really like my job sometimes and it was just my little way of thanking them for being such a good group. If all my classes were like them I would be in heaven here. And when you consider that Ken’s students are roundhouse kicking eachother and getting in bloody fistfights altercations like this really are but in perspective.
• In my last class of the day they were graduated off of their Pop-Up textbooks and onto a storybook. I only mention the name of the textbooks we use for elementary schools b/c it only occurred to me to today that “Pop-up” sounds a little like “Baapo” (the Korean word for silly-head or fool) and I finally understood why kids liked repeating the title when I said it. I was told the students would be on this textbook for one month, I’m not sure if they just mean until the end of this month (the January break time) because the book is very short. I see this class three times a week and in a month that would mean that we could only cover less than half a page of this book each time if we paced it properly. As it was we finished a quarter of it (including all associated activities in their books) in one class, and this was with me trying to hold them back. One of the students who has never cared about anything in class was so thrilled to be reading it she got almost angry when I told her we couldn’t do it all in one day. So I had the kids all read for all the different characters, and to basically eat up time but also to give them some proper practice on how to say things I drama coached them through it. If the little girl said ‘I’m so hungry mom!” I told the kid reading it to be almost in tears when saying it. Then for the other kid to be super angry. It took them a little while to get out of the robotic recitals they were used to but once they did they loved it. They cast me in one of the parts and my performance had them laughing so hard one of them fell out of their chairs. It was nice to see such a usually unmotivated class having fun with English class. I’m starting to learn how to toe the line of being entertaining to them. Go too far and they will lose respect for you and call you Baapo, but a little once in a while goes a long way.
Well that’s enough blogging for one day, hopefully Ken and I will have some weekend adventures to relate soon.
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