ESL Adventures

Teaching in South Korea

Archive for November, 2011

WoongJin Shadowing

As I said before, we’re now part of the Woongjin Plus Academy franchise.  It has its good points and bad points.  Classes that are slightly more advanced have the option of doing shadowing.  Essentially it’s reading a chapter book in addition to their curriculum.  It’s kind of fun.  Of the three classes doing it, two love it.  The third class is 2 fifth graders and they hate everything.  And I have the wonderful luck to be teaching the book “Speaking Tutor” to them.  Yeah, it is as bad as you think.

Now, of course, we can’t just read and discuss the book.  No, I have a book of various activities we’re supposed to work through.  I am the teacher.  Thus I am going to pick the activities I want to do.  Plus, according to some teachers, I should be teaching language, not literacy.  *cough* bull shit *cough*.  Whatever.  It’s actually easier to do that with the younger kids because there is so much grammar they don’t know.  So, one of my activities is going to be finding and writing all the irregular past tense verbs we can find.  Then we’ll write their base form.  Presto.  Language activity.  There is also a lot of directional language in the book (up, down, left, right, etc) so I’m going to write the sentence from the book and we’ll draw a picture to illustrate the sentence.  Bingo.  Language activity.

The older students are doing a lot of writing.  They have a worksheet they have to complete for each chapter.  This is one I made.  I’ll have to throw it in my dropbox so I can post it here.  Friday’s activity was to describe the main character’s personality now and then in the future (I told them 20 years).  You would have thought I asked them to write a dissertation on the main character of “The Elevator Duck”.  I wanted a paragraph on each.

Oh well.  If I think of anymore great activities, I’ll talk about here.

posted by Kathryn in Grammar,Language,Reading,Students,Teaching,Woonjin Plus,Writing and have No Comments

11-11-11

Happy Peppero Day all.  I was wondering if there were going to be any super fun or weird pepperos floating around.  I can say, I’ve seen the biggest boxes of them EVER.

I got about a half-dozen boxes from my students.  One of my kindergarteners gave me a cell phone charm that is a little girl holding a giant peppero.  Now that I love.  It’s so cute.

Believe it or not, I didn’t eat any.  Well, no, I take that back.  I ate one and then gave the rest of the box to the two students in my class.

You can buy them year round, but people usually only eat them on 11-11.  After 6 Peppero days, I can say I never want to see another one as long as I live.  It was worse when I taught in a full kindergarten.  I came home with a shopping bag full of them.  Most of all, I think my palate has changed.  I don’t crave sweets the way I used to.

I decided to go to Outback (what, did you think I was living in war-torn Korea?) for dinner.  I decided to get the Chocolate Thunder from Down Under.  Big mistake.  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a scoop of whipped cream on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of a warm brownie.  My stomach is still yelling at me.

And thus so ends another Peppero Day.  It’ll probably be back to the same old regular sized boxes.  And for those who have no idea what I’m babbling on about, here a short history.

posted by Kathryn in Celebrations,Food and Drink,Holidays,Just Wow,Korea and have No Comments

The Power of a Typo

My day started off rocky.  Long story, not relevant to this blog.  At least the day got better.  There was a typo in one of my text books.  “doing” was written as “dong”.  All of a sudden I hear “TEACHER ddong.  Hahahahahahahahaha!  Ddong!”  If you haven’t figured it out yet, ddong is Korean for dung.  It took me a minute to figure out what they were going on about.  And I admit.  I laughed.  You almost had to.  Only 1st graders would find that.  Case in point, the 4th graders later today didn’t even see it.  And I didn’t point it out.

Oh yes, and if you scroll down some (well, keep scrolling, you’ll get there), you’ll find the badge for my semi-new Facebook page.  Please drop by.  If you like the blog, consider giving me a like on my page.  Leave a message too.  I’m curious to see who my readers are and to get to know you.

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Just Wow,Spelling,Students,Woonjin Plus and have No Comments

Hot Potato – Version 2.0

A few weeks ago I wrote about using Hot Potato as a speaking game in the ESL classroom.  Well, here is version 2.0.  As I was playing with McQueen class (an older, low intermediate class) I decided I shouldn’t have to do all the work.  Why yes, I can be lazy late on Thursday.

You play Version 2.0 the same as the original version.  But instead of the teacher asking questions, the student who gets the hot potato has to ask a question of another student in the class.  I think this is a much better version.  Asking questions is a skill that gets practiced less as students progress up the ESL ladder.  And if I don’t have to ask the questions, I can pay closer attention to the problems students have in forming questions and making appropriate responses.

If I get really motivated, I’ll make a dedicated hot potato mp3 that I can just put on my iPod.  That would reduce the time I spent stabbing at the pause button and I can pay more attention to potential disasters.

Try it out.  As always let me know how it goes.

posted by Kathryn in Activites,Games,Speaking and have No Comments

And We Now…

…Return You to Your Regularly Scheduled Theme.

Though I was tempted to change to something with a Christmas flare to it.  As I was walking in front of Lotte Department Store, they were putting up the holiday displays.  Did I mention this was yesterday?  Halloween?  And here I thought leaving the US would get me away from the consumerism.  I certainly picked the wrong country.

posted by Kathryn in Home Life and have No Comments