My first day of class

Today was my first day of teaching. My first group of children are working with books which deal with simple sentences containing words that are difficult to pronounce. Many of the students have a great vocabulary and can differentiate between each component of a sentence. As I listened to a child read, I would periodically stop them and ask them to point to a word as it was represented in the picture. They were excellent at this and know the meanings of some complicated words. It seems that my job will be to help them with pronunciation and with their ability to form complete sentences.

To start working on this we played the name game. I've met so many people so far, I can hardly keep track, especially because Korean names are difficult for me to remember & throughout the school day there are so many new faces.

I asked questions such as: what is your name in Korean? and What would you like for your English name to be? Then we talked about birthdays and I asked what they would each like to learn to talk about in English. I finished by asking what American food they want to make with me in class next Tuesday. For each question I would ask them to write down their answer in a complete sentence and then take turns saying it out loud. Many were great at all of this while others drew pictures or tried providing one word answers. With a little help finding words or with spelling, almost everyone did a terrific job.

The children are adorable and while many of them are shy, a little one-on-one work opens them up to discussing things.

Mom, you would not envy me for my afternoon class. All of them are boys with the exception of one girl who is my most shy student ( poor girl! ). This class includes Chan-Yeup , whom you will soon hear a lot about, and his peers. When I walked in today they were trying to play indoor soccer in my classroom and it took awhile to calm them down! (I'm going to implement your countdown-to-quite stragegy tommorrow.)

Tommy wanted me to ask about their dream jobs. If my memory serves me correctly I have one baseball player, 4 soccer players, 1 doctor ( Chan-Yeup), 1 dentist, and 2 chefs.

Emperor, the leader of the group, told me good-bye followed by, "I love you teacher!"

I love my new job.