End of Week 1.....

Well, it's the end of the first week, and though I'm grateful I have 2 days off I had a really amazing week. While my smallest kids were crying and shy on Tuesday they were hugging me in the middle of lessons, dancing spontaneously during the ABC song and speak English about 2% of the time now - already progress!! I have made the deal with them that if they KNOW the English word they aren't allowed to say the Korean word, and it's working GREAT! Already most of the colours and numbers along with the words pencil, teacher, boy, girl, bookbag, big, small, lunch and friend are permanent residents in our classroom with my 10 little munchkins - I'm so proud of them already!! They listen to me so well (even with my barely-there froggy voice), and I already think they're miles ahead of some other classes, if only because I think they can do more independently than some of my partner teachers think their students can, and I make them... sometimes we learn because we 'do' and not because we're shown how, right?! They are really adorable, and while "teacher! uh-oh, teacher help me!" and "finished teacher" (no pinishee in my room!) are getting old, lol, they're in English!!

Monday and Friday at our school are long days where we teach from 3-7 in the afternoons, rather than only 3-5. Though the term has just begun I had until today had a very l....o....n....g 2 classes so far with the school's 'special' class that has been assigned to me for giving them the love of English, as my boss put it. They are the lowest level elementary kids we have, who, despite their time in English, are really struggling to learn. There is one student in particular (Jenny) that I have been having so much struggle with in the class... won't sit, all 'talk talk talk' when she should be reading or listening, and all 'ANYTHING BUT TALKING' when she should be speaking, playing with her (puppy) pencil case and REFUSING to give it to me when I made the mistake of giving her an ultimatum... let me just say that those were 2 looooong and a little bit disheartening blocks. Then I learned something new yesterday when I was talking with another teacher about the class...

Didn't anyone tell you that Jenny's in the wrong grade? She's actually too young for our school, but now she's enrolled and they don't want to tell her mom. Boss thought she was just finishing grade one in public school, but she's just starting it NOW. The other kids are 9 and 10 years old but she's only 7 and has never been in elementary school!

Wow. Can I just say, that this little piece of information saved me (and probably Jenny) so much strife? I thought Jenny had already been through 2 years of (very scary and discipline-heavy) Korean public school, and that she was developmentally 2 years older than she was. Being only 7 years old means that she's just 6 Canadian years old, starting school a year ahead of her Korean peers. I needed a waaaaaay different approach, almost like I use with my kindy kids, pretty much all love and patience and cuddles and (did I already mention patience?) to keep her involved in the lessons.

Today, even with my new information, Jenny and I were having a disagreement about her pencil case, and I gave her 2 choices of what she could do with it until class ended: 1. Put it on my chair (I usually stand and walk around when I teach) or 2. Go out and give it to Uncle (Boss), which is 'discipline' in our school. I tried to force her hand by giving her a good/bad choice scenario. Instead, she furiously shook her head 'no,' clutching the soft little puppy pencil case tightly to her chest like it was a real dog, and pointed that she wanted to put it in her backpack. Since I had given her an ultimatum in front of the rest of the students (dumb mistake of the week, I know better than that!) I didn't want to let her create option 3, so I took the case from her and brought her to tears in her chair (that felt just great, ugh...), putting it on my chair where she could see it. She did stop crying after a minute or 2, but I was not lovin' on my child management skills.

When I took a breath after straining to be heard/attended to by the remaining other kids, I noted that I was actually having quite a bit of trouble due to the seating arrangement (self-selected seating problems) with some of my older kids, so I had an idea... it was born from the suggestion that it's much easier to accommodate developmentally appropriate play and thinking, rather than forcing choices on kids...

There were 9 chairs around my table with 8 children who needed to sit. I drew a picture of my kidney-shaped table on the board with the 9 circles for chairs, and assigned each student a new chair (not beside their friends anymore, of course) for next week's class. Then, I assigned 'puppy' the empty chair next to Jenny, with the agreement (shook on it and everything!) that if puppy wasn't listening quietly to the lesson and studying (I gave puppy an extra book to sit on and a pen to take care of), she would have to live in Jenny's backpack until break time. One of my other students piped up, pointing to an empty 'baby chair' in the corner, on the other side of little Jenny's chair (in the corner, not right at our table): "Teacher! Teacher! That chair can be puppy's special chair, right? It's a good place!", and all of the rest of the kids clapped. I love children, they amaze me at every turn. My 10-year old tough boy who's too cool for English provided an even better solution to the problem than I had... this way puppy will actually be out of Jenny's reach, but can be observed by the whole class, and Jenny was *T*H*R*I*L*L*E*D* with the solution, all smiles for the remaining 95 minutes, reading, writing, speaking and everything.

I let her stand by her chair instead of sitting when she needed to be up and moving around (the other kids didn't seem distracted). I also spent quite a lot of the lesson teaching with her tucked close to me, under my arm, holding my hand, beside me at the table, all while still teaching to the other kids, AND getting her to focus on her lesson. Puppy remained in the special chair for the rest of class. It was magical I tell you. It probably sounds crazy, sounds crazy to me even as I just re-read it, lol, but it was frickin' great and I felt like a million bucks when my class of 8 kids (+puppy) who 'hate English class' danced out of my classrom after almost a FULL 2 hours of reading and grammar work loudly singing 'see you Monday teacher' at 7pm on a Friday... a million bucks...

THEN I went and picked up
Mags from the groomer's...

My poor puppy... I'm so sorry!