School started up again and it's been SO(rt of) exciting. Getting back into the swing of the work week including all of my and my co-teachers good, bad and new habits has been fine. This semester is supposed to go faster because of more holiday breaks including one coming up at the end of the month, and thus rushed lessons. As well as a BIG 'Sports Day' at the end of the month which the students regularly miss class to practice for.
Activity 1
Another event though that was more academic than 'Sports Day' occurred two weeks ago: The English memorization contest! Here students in grades 4th, 5th and 6th had to memorize all of the dialogues (2 apiece) from each chapter about various topics. Each teacher then whittled down (if you started snoring by now it's cool...) the top two from every class and myself and 3 other teachers presided over the judgement. What I thought was interesting was that a good deal of the students were NOT the ones who participated in class. But give them some solo study time I guess and they are good to go.
The way it worked though we had to grade each student on every line of the sheet. It took exactly
two hours at the end of a busy day and my focus by the end was wwwaaaiiinnning but that is what it is.
Above is half of what the students had to memorize. Below a 5th grade girl finds out which dialogues she had to recite
Here was the lottery to decide the order in which the contestants would recite.
Activity 2!
The 5th grade lesson was on 'birthdays' (months, dates, "When is your birthday?"). I had the students do an ice breaking activity to start I learned in college. Two teams, boys and girls. Each team has to line up by their birth date from Jan to Dec WITH OUT TALKING. Thus my "Quite please" cheat prevention in the video. It's a good activity to get the blood flowing, plus the lower level students can participate. This class was especially animated with the MMMMMing.
Activity 3
I just liked this picture. We were playing a four-corners game for vocab review. There are 6 sheets of paper with different vocab taped around the room. The music plays (always,
Gangnam Style) and they walk in a circle, when the music stops they say the vocab word and we somehow pic a vocab word and that word's students are out. To spice things up on Fri. I was being silly and had one student act as a wall and I tapped the word to their face or chest. Some kids took to this roll and the spotlight instantly. This one student took the more stoic -- most
wall-like I suppose -- role. He got rewarded with the much coveted vitamins afterwards.
Activity 4
Finally some 6th stuff. Here the students are doing a survey to find out how their classmates get to school. Out of 30 students and two teachers usually 90% walk to school. There is no bus system so the one student you see marked on the survey takes this lil shuttle bus that goes around the neighborhood (and, vitally, cuts my commute to the subway by 10 min).
Also, in case you were not aware, surveys double as trumpets (on the left).
And lastly my own activity. On Friday I had a batting cage, Playstation Cafe, darts kind of night but other than that I've stayed in. This was my Saturday night dinner. Cajun sweet potato fries, and chicken sandwich with cheesy Cholula sunny side up eggs and greens. It's an activity because between prepping, toasting the bred on the broiler (which is on top of my fridge and so I get a decent amount of exercise climbing my chair to check on what's cooking), then cooking the fries, eggs and chicken and then finally eating (hopefully cleaning too, but I don't want to exaggerate) it takes between 90 to 120 minutes to get dinner for one. But TASTY though so details.
Should be run-of-the-mill week coming up but...
GO BOLTS!
