Archive for the 'Writing' Category

Nov

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

Jul

Oh Yes!

Actually I don’t have to deal with too much LOL Speak. I deal mostly with your common everyday errors.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Off time,Teaching,Writing and have No Comments

Sep

Travel and Tourism Project

D1 is one of the highly advanced classes in the school. It’s made up of 5th and 6th graders. They’re a lot of fun to teach. I do language skills with them. For me, that consists of a day of grammar, a day of writing, a day of reading and a day of project type stuff.

The project we just finished was to design a travel and tourism poster for a country (real or fictional). The class decided to split themselves into a boys team and a girls team. They boys decided to do a poster for the fictional “Buzz Island”. The girls decided to do a poster for Korea. I created an outline for them to fill out and help with their research and writing. Once that was finished, they wrote a one page summary of their country. They also used the Internet to find images that represented facets of their chosen country. Well, the girls used the Internet. Because Buzz Island is fictional, they had to create all of their stuff by hand.

Their country descriptions follow:

Buzz Island

Buzz Island is located under the Korean Peninsula. It doesn’t have a climate. It consists of water. Its area is bigger than China. One of its natural resources is hydrogen. The population is only 5 people, and they speak Korean. They believe in Christianity. Its industries are semiconductors, cars, ships and plastics. Buzz Island’s capital city is Buzz D.C. The currency is the Buz. Their national food is butter. People typically wear western clothes. One notable tradition is the festival of Buzz’s birthday. Major cities on Buzz Island are Buzz D.C., Buzzton, New Buzz, Buzzfort and Buzz Angeles. Some interesting places to visit are Buzz Street, Buzz Junior Island, The Yellow House and Buzz Vat.

Korea

Korea is located in Asia. It has four seasons, spring, summer, fall and winter. Spring is warm, summer is hot, fall is cool, and winter is cold. There are mountains and flat plains. It has an area of 99,900 square km. The population of Korea is 48,456,4721 people. They speak Korean and the study of English is popular. Korea’s religions are Christianity and Buddhism.

Our famous products are cars, plastics and semi-conductors. Our government is a democracy. The leader is Lee Myung Bak. Our capital city is Seoul. The currency is the won.

Our traditional foods are kim-chi, rice cakes and danganchigae. Day to day, people wear western clothes. The name of Korea’s traditional clothing is han-bok. Traditional holidays are New Year’s Day and Chu-seok. Major cities in Korea are Busan, Seoul, Ulsan and Kyengju. Busan is famous for Hae-Un-Dae Beach and Seoul is famous for Kyeung-Bok Palace. Kyeungus is famous for Bul-Gook-Sa and Ulsan is famous for Ban-Gu-Dae, which has many fossils.

~Come visit our country!~

Here are some pictures:

Buzz Island Poster

Nick, Buzz, David, Tommy, Arthur, Jay

Korea Poster

Rachel, Amy, Sarah

posted by Kathryn in Activites,Language,Little Campus,Pictures,Reading,Students,Teaching,Writing and have No Comments

Mar

One more class

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.

posted by Kathryn in Little Campus,Reading,Science,Teaching,Writing and have No Comments

Feb

Save the Words

see more puppies

I came across “Save the Words” a few days ago (warning, obnoxious website). The premise is that words that are less common in every day language will be removed from dictionaries. The people who made this site want to save those words from exclusion. I doubt the site would do much to save some of these words. However, it could serve as an interesting teaching tool for advanced students. Many of the words can be analyzed to find their meaning from the word roots. This is something I’ve worked on a bit with some of my more advanced students.

Personally, I adoped “nidifice” (noun: a nest)

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Language,Teaching Resources,Web sites,Writing and have No Comments

Jan

The 12 Days of Christmas — Korean Style

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.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a big pot of spicy kimchi.
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me, two shots of soju.
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me, three orange restaurants.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, four Taekwondo belts.
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, five hand phones.
On the six day of Christmas my true love gave to me, six lovely hanboks.
On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me, seven rolls of kimbap.
On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, eight bags of ramyan.
On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, nine taxi drivers.
On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, ten chewy rice cakes.
On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me, eleven English hagwons.
On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, twelve bowls of rice.

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.