Woke up at 6am, like clockwork. It’s the start of the third week of work and the beginning of English summer camp. It is my big test, a classroom of 20 students from third and forth grades by myself for three straight hours. It could become something really bad or something great. Thankfully, I’ve heard from many other teachers that many of the students like me, so hopefully that will work to my advantage. I have an outline for the class, keeping the first day easy with an overview of the basics: introduction, my name is, goodbye, alphabet, numbers, ordinal numbers, and shapes. This is something every student has been taught, but their English levels aren’t the same. I got to school early and made copies of a couple of my worksheets. Class was held in the Science room, since the English room didn’t have a television or a projector for my ppt lectures.
I handed out my ‘English Camp Rules’ while another teacher took roll for me. I was told that my project for the day was to make sure all the students had English names. By the end of class all of the students had their English names.
The students were quite respectful to me, probably out of fear. No one tests the waters on the first day. After the lecture, I had prepared reading and repeating activity with the book, “Count with Maisy”. My outline helped me through the whole class and at the end there was enough time for a game of ‘Alphabet Attack Soup’. I wrote letters on the board in random and there were two teams: boys vs. girls. First one to point at the correct letter gets a point, if guessed incorrectly no more guesses and no points. It was a huge hit and the best way I could make the teams fair since the 3rd grade was at a lower English level to the 4th grade. Thank goodness English camp day one was a success. Some of the teachers came in periodically through the class to see how it was going and they were impressed at my variety of activities and keeping the class on task. After camp was over, I had lunch with the teachers in the teachers lounge; we had ordered food out, since we had to stay on school grounds until 4:40pm. I ate the spicy noodle soup and then prepared for All Day Class. We were covering part 2 of the in-depth look at letters: I-P. After teaching the All Day Class, I was so tired, it’s hard to keep up with their enthusiasm, but I love that they all participate so well in class, so it’s a catch-22. One of the kids gave me an origami heart with Korean on it; I wish I knew what it said.
After class I got a wonderful surprise, my own computer and printer in the English room and its completely in English! Too bad it wasn’t connected to the Internet yet. In a matter of time, it will be, hopefully.
I prepared for my next day’s classes until the end of the workday. I had a quiet evening in after a long (yet worth every worry) day. I really do enjoy teaching and I now finally feel like a real teacher, sort of.
you should post more pictures :)
ReplyDeleteSucks about the internet :(