Elsa's Adventures: There and back again, a traveler's tale!: February 2015

Inpyeong Elementary School

As many of you can see, I haven't written in a long, long, long time. While skyping with my family, I was reminded of my blogging absence by my wonderful aunt Melanie! It's nice to know people read my blogs and want to know what I'm up to, so here is another blog for all my friends and family!

School was a big part of my life here in Korea, so I want to give you a good idea of what teaching in Korea was like for me!

Kindergarten-

These are my adorable kindergarteners! We get to work on English once a week for 40 minutes, and in that time we have a lot of fun. Kindergarten is also my hardest class to prepare for and to teach. One week will be unbelievable... we will laugh and work really hard. The kids will listen and respond well to the lesson. I leave class on cloud nine thinking, man I am nailing this teaching thing. The next week is chaos and I go back to my office feeling deflated, confused, and disappointed. I have more successful days, than train wrecks... but it's the rough days that are hard to move on from. Slowly but surely, I am getting better at teaching this little ones. I am learning new strategies, finding effective activities, and really enjoying their energy.

For this class, there is no text book or format I have to follow. I create lessons around themes, usually stories. Above you can see my Kindergartener's with their Big Green Monster Faces. We used this story to review colors and talk about body parts, specifically parts of the face. They loved it!

This is a video of the kids making Very Hungry Caterpillars! We used that story to review numbers and to introduce food vocabulary. The kids were proud to have their own books that they could read to their parents.

Here are my little Brown Bears. We spent a couple weeks on this story talking about animals and colors. Then, we made Brown Bear masks... some of my kids decided not all bears are brown or I really did a terrible job teaching. Let's chalk this one up to creative kids :)

These kids love Frozen, an understatement for sure! Before Christmas we did a unit on winter. We learned some songs, winter vocabulary, and made snowmen. Olaf was a big hit!

This is how we end every class, it's the goodbye song. They usually get really into it, but in this video some of them are pouting because their candy cane reindeer broke. I think broken candy canes build character, you're welcome kids ;)

3rd Grade

My third graders are also cute, but in a very different way. They learn English so quickly and they love singing, playing games, and teaching me Korean. They always walk into class and crowd around me, each telling me something very exciting about their day, weekend, or year... I rarely understand. Sometimes they pool all their English together to make sure their message is coming across... it's really sweet and amazing. They are at the age where they love to use what they are learning. They also love to see how much they can get away with and are always trying to pull the wool over this foreigners' eyes. Stickers are the life blood of my classroom management strategy with these folks. They have individual sticker charts and a class sticker chart. Usually I just have to walk towards the board to erase a sticker and the classroom polices itself!

These are some of my 3rd graders at winter camp. They have to put their arms up in the air when they hear their color. They really like this song, especially the funny squeaky bird.

Here is one of my 3rd graders at an English speech competition. He nailed his speech and used some cool puppets along the way!

These third graders are performing for a Korean cultural festival.

This is a game I invented and my third graders loved it. You had to move around the board and draw cards. Then you had to do what was on the card. For example, if the card had the word cat, you had to draw a picture of a cat.

These are two of the sweetest third graders around.

3-5 was such a great class! We had lot's of fun everyday!!!

4th Grade

Fourth grade was the age group that I had the least amount of interaction with. My co-teacher was the lead teacher and I planned games and activities to coincide with her lessons. She is a wonderful teacher, so I got to learn a lot from working with her. The kids were really fun too, and since I was the game teacher they enjoyed coming to my classroom. The fourth graders impressed me with their dedication to English and their ability to retain information. They were also determined to speak with me and would seek me out in the hallways, before and after class, and even in the bathroom sometimes :) I think I received the most cards from this group of kids.

4th graders performing for the Korean culture day.

4-5 we are setting up the rules for some sort of game. About half the class in on a trip, so it is a small group today.

These three boys were trouble and sweetness all wrapped up into one. Their English was really great, so we had fun hanging out before class.

Fourth grade is when some of the kids start getting shy about having their pictures taken. They have no idea how adorable they are!

Some of my girls just hanging out before class.

This student made me so many cards. She was always staying after class to talk and giving me candy.

Four of my winter camp kids being wonderful. I was really impressed by how hard they worked at camp. I love it when kids try!

5th Grade

Oh 5th grade!!! Teachers are always supposed to say that they have no favorites and to a degree that is true, but this group of kids made me smile everyday. Their English ability was good enough that we could actually talk about things (limited to weather, daily activities, and food but still), they worked hard, they listened, and they loved to have fun. For most of the school year they weren't too cool for school yet, instead they were all about it! The last couple of weeks they started to morph into 6th graders, the change was drastic and top dog syndrome hit the tall boys especially hard. These kids have a very special place in my heart!

Of all my students, fifth graders were the ones who were always around. When I came back from lunch they were waiting for me in the classroom, they were always leaving little notes on my white board, and they always wanted to show me cool youtube videos.

They were also the age group who were most eager to sing to all my loved ones back home.

Here are a couple really high level English speaking boys. One of them lived in Malaysia for awhile and he was a great resource in class. I could give directions and he would help make sure everyone understood.

Like I said, 5th graders liked to have fun. This is a minute to win it game. When the students met their sticker goal they got to have a fun day with games and prizes!

Here are my kids getting into a shopping unit. They loved it way more than I thought they would!

For Halloween we built monsters and then described them. One of my favorites: "My monster's name is Elsa. She has many big blue eyes. Elsa likes spider. Elsa is very cute!!!" This girl got full credit!

We were working on descriptive words. I put a picture on the screen and the students were put in groups of 4. 3 kids could see the picture, one couldn't. They had to describe the person and the one who couldn't see it had to draw what they were describing. It got pretty loud and there was a lot of laughing.

6th Grade

Many of my friends had the most trouble teaching their sixth graders. They were a challenge, but one that I enjoyed. They were pretty 'cool' at times, but usually a fun activity could make them forget that. This age group loved to voice their opinions and we were able to dive deeper into topics. They were also the most shy about speaking English and the most self conscious. I found that using my terrible Korean lightened the mood and made them feel more confident. We did a lot of small group activities instead of large group high pressure situations.

Sixth grade graduation. Each class prepared something.

I love the awkwardness!

A sixth grader giving a speech for our English competition. She rarely speaks in class so I was impressed by her performance.

Sixth graders watching K-pop before class, probably EXO Overdose!

Sixth graders at summer camp. They were zombies for the role-play.

Board games were really popular in 6th grade.

They were great at helping each other!

I was able to walk around and better access their ability while they had fun.

My Co-teachers

I was blessed with the most amazing co-teachers! All of them were kind, supportive, helpful, and great partners in the classroom.