ESL Adventures

Today (Thursday) and tomorrow are our “Theme Days”.  It’s just a fancy way of saying we take the kids to the park for the day and play games with them.  All of the foreign teachers came up with games/activities for the kids to do.  Rozina is playing Ultimate Frisbee.  Mark is playing Rugby.  Donna is playing Dodge Ball.  Peter is playing Soccer Baseball (Kickball to you Americans).  Janie is playing a modified version of Lawn Bowling.  Jessica is playing Keys.  And your’s truly is playing Quiz Show.

Wait you say.  Everyone else is doing fun physical stuff and I’m basically teaching.  Of course.  The powers that be decided we needed one “quiet” activity.  And I’m the lucky one.  I was going to do Dodge Ball.  But Donna has been here less than two weeks and I decided to just pass along my lesson plan to her to make her life easier.

So my “Quiz Show” consisted of me saying sentences and the kids having to tell me yes or no.  I had them hold their arms in the shape of a circle for yes and in the shape of an x for no.  I had some really goofy sentences like “The grass is purple.” and “Kathryn Teacher is a boy.” for the kids to respond to.  I really liked my goofy sentences because the kids laughed a lot.  With the more advanced kids I did things like “The word hat is a noun.” to quiz their knowledge of English grammar.

And when I say lucky, I really do mean lucky.  It was almost 95 degrees and humid today (and more of the same tomorrow).  While everyone else was running around in the sun, I was sitting in the shade.   Even in the shade, it’s hot.  We all came well prepared with sport drinks and sunscreen.  I was out in the sun for a while playing in the fountain with some of the kids.  And my face is red.

We do the same thing again tomorrow.  By the end of the day (pre-schoolers in the morning and elementary kids in the afternoon) all the kids should have cycled through all of our stations.  I have no idea what else might be going on tomorrow.

The one thing I could do without (besides the heat) was the one Korean teacher running around with the megaphone and blasting the siren to get the kids’ attention (think Ty Pennington, but worse).  Granted, it worked the first four or five times.  But she overdid it.  She kept blasting it.  I’m surprised the batteries lasted all day.  At one point, she blasted it right in my ear.  I came within second of snatching it out of her hands and throwing it into the fountain.

I did take a bunch of pictures today, but I’m too tired to upload them right now.  Plus, getting them off my camera would involve rebooting into Windows and I can’t do that right now as I’m running some test results for a new BOINC project.  So I’ll upload them to my picture site this weekend and post some of the better ones on my blog.