Telling the time
My lessons today went fairly well on the whole. I covered telling the time with all of my groups, although at very different paces. With the youngest ones we spent quite some time understanding “half past”, “a quarter past” and “a quarter to” but the older kids already knew and it was just a case of me checking.
“Mr Wolf” went down well today, although we had one accident in the first lesson with a girl hitting a desk, so I quickly stopped that and got on with the other stuff. With the other two sessions I took the kids outside to the playground but we actually ended up with more accidents there! Today I caused one bumped shoulder, three grazed knees and one grazed elbow (all but the bumped shoulder (which happened in the classroom) happened on the very last run of the day) so I’ll have to think twice before trying that again… maybe we could move to the grass, but I doubt that is much softer and it is quite a walk away.
I’ve got the hang of all but the oldest class now (the 11 and 12-year-olds), so I’m happy about that. Controlling the oldest kids is really hard, but I think that’s because I’m trying to teach them stuff they already know, or find too easy. Or again, maybe they just know I can’t do much, who knows? I’m having real trouble judging their level but I think this is partly because it varies quite a lot.
I’ve spoken a lot more with Chris, who taught for a whole semester, and it turns out she had just two lessons with each set per week. I have a lesson with every single class (except the other school, which alternate days) every single day (although there has been one day off so far). This does alter things quite a lot—Chris managed a single “theme” for the week, which is one of the hard things to come up with. So in planning her lessons she would spend a couple of hours coming up with a theme, a basic lesson, varying levels of questions and games for the different ages… and that would last a week (maybe a little under). But for me, I have to come up with a new theme almost every two days, which is proving difficult. To make it a little worse the older set have requested I do sports with them (after I asked what they wanted to cover)—I plain can’t come up with any ideas for games, songs, quizzes, etc. to make this work. If anybody reading this can think of anything, please let me know!
Tomorrow and the following day (depending on how well what I’ve planned goes) I will be teaching animals. Again, something they must have done before (but even Chris said she was sure everything she did had been done before—I suppose learning by repetition does work) but with any luck some of the ideas I and UA have had will be a little different.
I’ll introduce animals by starting with dates and the time (from yesterday). This will be by asking questions about the Chinese calendar—what animal are you? I’m a rat, etc. Once we’ve got these listed, I’ll add some more (ask if they know them) and then we’ll have a go at singing “Old MacDonald” (if I can get my lyrics sheet photocopied). Next, we’ll try and describe the animals by answering set questions (How big is it? What colour is it? Does it have wings? How many legs does it have? How many legs does it walk on (this could be quite hard)? Does it have fur? Does it have a tail? and so on). This is a good chance to pick on people in the audience. Finally the game that Vlad sort-of suggested (but I changed a lot)—get some blank stickers, write an animal (a simple, easy to identify one) on and stick it on some poor little kid’s head.
Get the boy/girl to stand at the front of the class and make him/her ask questions. So “What colour am I?” and all the other questions we learned/practised earlier. Obviously the aim is to figure out what animal they are.
If, after all that, there is still some time left (which amazingly could happen) we can always fall back to “Head, shoulders…” or, as quite a few of the older kids requested, just play a game of Bingo.
It’s already quite late now and I need to go over this a little more. After tomorrow I have another free morning, so I will finally catch up with the things I meant to yesterday. I’m also glad that Saturday is my last day with the other kids, which means that once my last lesson finished at 11:50am I have the whole afternoon free. I should finally be able to get some travelling/sightseeing/touristing done.
Bye for now!
Tags: "Teaching"