I teaching three hours of kinder each day, a half an hour of 1st grade students and another hour of students who are around the 5th grade.
One class of 5th graders (Monday/Wednesday) have tolerably good English - they can understand just about everything I say, we just need to work on grammar. I brought some games from NZ to Korea with me this time, and this class have fallen in love with Billionaire - so have discovered the perfect motivation - they do two pages in their book - and do it well! Then we spend the rest of the class playing Billionaire.
The other class (Tuesday/Thursday) have terrible English - in fact they have about as much English as I have Korean - we muddle through with translators and dictionaries but it has been a struggle, they don't want to work as they have learned to hate English because it is hard and they continually fail. Today though I put a new plan into place and they actually did homework :-) I have organised that the Korean teacher will cover the textbook and I am just going to work on increasing their vocabulary. So I made a list of 100 words from the textbook and have told them that when they know all 100 words I will take them out for dinner - now they are trying to decide if it will be chicken or pizza or hamburgers ... Anyway as a result they are actually working - however they have insisted that I must learn the Korean for the words they are learning English for - so now I have 100 words to learn too - and I had to do the same homework as I had assigned them :-) All in a good cause!
My 1st graders are very cute, I have been working on getting them into learning habits - eyes on page/computer/me, hands empty, ears open and mouths closed. Today they used tape to tape their mouths closed - totally their own idea. Made me laugh as I remembered certain nameless students from the chemistry days who also used to do this.
And the Kinders, what can I say? I think I am falling in love - who would have thought. So let me describe my life as a Kinder teacher. It could not be more different from, being a chemistry teacher if it tried. I will say I was filled with trepidation when I realised exactly what I had signed up for - but it is turning out to be quite delightful.
This is where today's writing starts :-)
One of my babies, (she is 7 by Korean age, 5 by ours) she is determined to do the things that scare her, to conquer her fears. When I first got there she and her friend would put their chairs on the desk and sit on then while they practised their vocabulary. When it came time to get down, the friend would just jump, but she would sit down on the edge and then slide off - and it's not actually very high, maybe 50cm, but when your only 100cm tall yourself I guess that seems like a huge amount. Anyway she was determined to master the jump. So each day somewhere during free time she climbs onto the desk, first she would just stand on the edge for a long time looking down, before she would sit and slide off. Then she started squatting on the edge, and holding my hands and she would jump from a squat. The day she jumped from a squat without holding my hands I was so proud!!!!!! Then she started trying to jump from a standing position, again holding my hands. Yesterday she did a standing jump all by herself. Today she did not bother to climb on the desk. Fear conquered. :-D
Now it is time to post this, but I have decided I'm going to get back on the blogging band wagon and tell you a Kinder story every day. :-)
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