All About the Bathroom

In the afternoons here I teach elementary school students for 50  minutes at a time. They go to "school" school in the morning from about 8 until 2, and then they go to private classes (like mine, math, music, science) all afternoon, some of them waaaaay into the evening.


One of the things I with one afternoon class is read and do comprehension activities with fun chapter books. My school is R*E*A*L*L*Y big on reading, and I love it, it's one of my favorite activities.


The kids read a chapter from our chosen book to themselves at the start of the class, circling or underlining any words that they're not sure of. After that, we read it together. I read the story aloud very actively as they follow in their books, and I explain everything (vocabulary, funny bits that they didn't understand were funny) along the way.


Uncle usually does a great job choosing stories, we started with Junie B Jones, moved onto a book from The Zack Files, and now we're reading "I Don't Want To!" from Bel Mooney's Kitty and friends series. The book is English so gives us a run for our money on vocabualary (did you know the sink is a washbasin, the washcloth is a flannel, and snack is tea?).


Kitty is a precocious little girl after my own heart who doesn't like to do anything adults tell her, but in each chapter (I don't want to... brush my teeth... eat my vegetables (a.k.a. veggie troubles)... wash...) she does eventually wind up doing what she's told in her own way.

In "I Don't Want to Wash," Mom is putting older brother Dan to bed when Kitty sneaks into the tub with all of her clothes on (less her socks and shoes of course!). When she got in the tub water splashed over the sides all over the floor. She couldn't reach the facecloth on the sink, so she pulled Mom's white decorative towel into the tub to wash her face.


Now Kitty was covered in jam and garden dirt (she's a little like Charlie Brown's Pig Pen), and after she had all that jam and dirt nice and wet from the tub she decides to get out (holding onto the wall so she didn't fall down, of course) to add her socks and shoes to the tub. Since they needed a good scrub, Kitty also grabbed Dan's toothbrush so she could clean up all the trouble spots.


My kids thought the chapter was cute, but they didn't understand why the messy business in the bathroom would make Mom mad? Even as I was explaining it (very exhuberantly of course!) they were looking at me a bit blankly. Then it occurred to me!


In Korea, bathrooms are much like "wash" rooms... the floors and walls are all ceramic tile and there is a drain right in the floor. There is no carpet, and family members wear plastic bathroom slippers when not showering/bathing because the floor is almost always wet. The sprayer from the shower is used to clean the entire bathroom, walls and floors, and then it is left to dry. If Kitty lived in Korea, mom would just have to quickly spray the room down afterward and the dirt would disappear!! As well, hand towels are never decorative (if they're there at all).


I explained the north-american bathroom to my kids (did you even know we had such a thing??)... there's often wallpaper on the walls... sometimes there's carpet... there are usually floor mats and toilet mats... there's NO drain in the floor... things in the bathroom would be ruined if they got wet, so the water stays where it belongs... what a difference!


After taking them on a 'tour' of the north american bathroom (and hopefully English as well, I've never been to the 'loo' in the UK) they clued in about why Kitty was going to be in trouble when her mom came in (their favorite part was the image of the jam and dirt dripping down the wall under her wet handprint on the wallpaper), and suddenly the events of the chapter had taken on whole new meanings for them.


Of course, they also loved the part about the toothbrush... I feel sorry for their family members if these kids get mad now... :)