Sue got married yesterday. Unlike the previous weddings I attended, this one was in a church. It was a beautiful service. Sue’s husband sang a love song to her during the wedding. I wish her and her husband the best of luck for the future. They’ll be honeymooning in Saipan.
So Jasmine came in last Friday and informed me that along with Nick and Daniel, I’d be taking the Anderson/Einstein/Dewey speaking and writing class. *sigh* Just what I wanted. Another class. And not only just another class, another Kindergarten class. I find they take a whole lot more energy than the elementary school classes. I just keep telling myself it’s an hour and half of overtime every week. Thankfully I only teach it three days a week.
I’m teaching reading. We’ll be reading the various “Classic Tales” books published by Oxford University Press. Nick is teaching writing. He’s using the “I Can Write English” series from Happy House. Daniel is teaching science with the “Blue Planet” series. I teach the class three days a week, Nick teaches twice a week and Daniel teaches all five days. Three of us are splittling the class because there weren’t two of us with all five days open in the two afternoon periods.
So here’s my current schedule. I have five kindergarten classes and eight elementary school class.
Our kindergarten naming scheme has changed, and I’m still trying to remember which classes are which.
As far as the classes I teach:
My Current Schedule
Well, in addition, to being totally busy, I’m also sick. I actually took a sick day today. Seriously, I never do that. The last time I took sick time was when the doctor dumped me in the hospital with pneunomia. That’s not something I want to repeat. I picked up a cold, probably from a student, but possibly a coworker. It so wonderfully turned into a sinus infection last week. That immediately traveled to my chest and I now have bronchitis. Oh yeah. The biggest reason I took off today was because I have no voice. Like, can’t even whisper no voice. My ears are also blocked up so I can’t hear much of anything.
So to kind of bring things up to date, we started our new term. We have a whole batch of new kids and the classes of the returning students have been rearranged. Again, I get the pleasure (ha!) of teaching the second floor Sha Sha program. It’s not so bad anymore. I’ve explained that the books they use for those kids are horrible. So I read story books and sing songs. The goal of the program isn’t to get the kids fluent in English. It’s really just general exposure in letters, sounds, colors and basic vocabulary. I have a 6 year old class and I have the 5 year old class. I met the 5 year olds yesterday. There’s about 15 of them. One one of them flipped out when he saw me. Poor little thing, he didn’t want any part of me. I have a feeling my 3.5 year old self probably wouldn’t have wanted much of anything to do with the adult me either. I don’t hold it against him. He’s a little cutie actually.
I have a total of 4 kindergarten classes, plus the Sha Sha classes. I have 6 classes in the afternoon (2 A classes, 2 B classes, 2 D classes) plus two speaking and writing classes (A1 and D3).
We finally are almost finished with a curriculum. This involved quite a few hours of meetings, but I think it will benefit everyone.
Ivory is doing well. When I took her to the vet last week, she had her first set of kitten shots. She’s still pure white except for a dime sized patch on the top of her head that’s gray (salt-and-pepper really). She was 1200 grams (2.65 pounds) at her vet visit and she’s about 3 months old. She’s now eating Hill’s Science Diet for kittens. She loves it. She devours it. In fact, she’s doing that right now. She loves the little toys on the end of an elastic band. She goes crazy. She leaps and twirls. Ivory still takes up the entire bed. I’m not sure how a tiny kitten can do that. But it seems where ever I want to sleep, she’s there. She’s actually outgrowing the kitten looking stage. She seems to be growing into her body. It’s amazing the changes in a few short weeks. I can’t even imagine life without her. I still miss Sparkler and Jeepers (my last cat). Nothing will ever replace them, but Ivory has her own place in my heart.
I’ll post my schedule and I’ll try to get the curriculum posted within the week.
Take care everyone!
Congratulations to our 7 year old classes. They graduated today. I was there for the November Class ceremony because I was their charge teacher. I have to admit, I cried. I had two thirds of those kids since I started teaching at Little Campus. I’ve seen them come so far, so fast. Most of them are moving on up to the A and B classes in the afternoon.
I do have pictures, but they’re not downloaded off my camera yet. Tonight’s a night for playing with the kitty (now named Ivory) and working on my homework.
On Christmas Eve, I took my turn in the cycle of teaching Ivy. Not wanting to do a boring discussion class (oh how I hate trying to get teenagers to talk), I decided to turn them loose on The 12 Days of Christmas lyrics. We listened to the song a couple of times and I told them they could work in pairs or small groups to come up with their own lyrics. The catch was the things they used as gifts had to be tied to Korea in some way. Here’s what we came up with in the end.
I think it’s really cute. True, some of the things aren’t unique to Korea, but they are popular here. Try to find anyone over the age of 7 without a hand phone (aka “cell phone” to you westerners). I’ve seen quite a few elderly men and women with them. And the taxi drivers? Well, that was my contribution. Every time I get into a taxi I say a quick prayer to get out in one piece.
OK, maybe not. My Christmas tradition is to give candy canes to all of my students. The kids love them. And as hard as I try to keep them from eating them before taking them home, I usually fail. I jokingly remarked that it would be fun to make them into reindeer this year. One of my coworkers saw pipe cleaners, eyes and little pompoms at Lotte Mart and bought me some. I tried making them with September class and it worked. The kids had a great time. So that night I went back to Lotte Mart to pick up some more. Of course, they didn’t have any more eyes. I ended up buying solid colored circle stickers, which worked pretty well.
All in all, the reindeer turned out really cute. The kids had a great time. And I had a nice break from teaching. It was still educational because they kids had to follow my directions, given in English. So yeah. It was teaching.
ESL Photos
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