So I thought I would give you a little insight into what exactly I am teaching these little bundles of joy. My kindergarten class (the 5-year-olds) have 4 books that we go through in a day. First book is our Hats On book. This book is designed to give generally vocabulary to the kids, teach them to associate English words with pictures, basic sentence structure, and what not. I have to do one unit a week, and each unit is eight pages. So I span it out for a week, about two pages a day, more or less depending on what the material is. If it's things Like sentences, I like to spend more time on it to make sure they at least kinda, sorta, maybe understand it. I spend about 40-50 minutes in this book each day. So last week, we learned how to say "I have a ..." so I have to teach them the meaning of the word "have" through examples, then I ask each student to tell me something they have with them, and the girls kind of make it a contest to see who can say the most impressive thing, while the boys make it a joke to see who can say the silliest thing. So Dorothy will say something like "I have a red crayon and a blue crayon" while Thomas will say something like "I have a box." The hardest part is getting them to deviate away from the examples in the book or the examples I give them, and have them thing creatively for themselves. Also in the Hats On book, they work on letter sounds and spelling. Luckily at the bottom of every page, it gives you a list of words or sentences that kids should try to work on. The last page of the unit though, simply has three numbers, with three pictures next to each number, and no instructions. When we get to that part, I basically say one of the pictures and the kids have to circle the right ones. I'm going to be honest, most of the boys in my class aren't that bright, and they don't really care about learning, so whenever we do something in class, and I need to make sure everyone answers, I have to write in my book, and they basically copy it. I've found that in the Korean system, they are more concerned about making sure the kids do their book work correctly, than the kids actually learning the language well (very frustrating).

The next book is called Activity Phonics, which mainly focuses on word sounds and letters of the alphabet. Each unit usually focused on one letter, and is usually four pages long. The first page is always the letter page, and it has picture that start with that letter. Sometimes though, I can't tell what all the pictures are. Take the "Q" page, I can see a quail, quill, quilt, question mark, queen, I am assuming the ducks are quacking. But then there are random things that I'm not sure if they are supposed to start with Q or not, like the thing the ducks are on, or the magnifying class, or the random chandelier. So most of the time I have to wing it. To give you a bit of understand of the minds of my kids, they know full well we are working on the letter Q, so I ask "Ok, what in this picture starts with Q?" and they will say "bird!" to which I will have to remind them that bird does not in fact start with a Q but with a B. Along with letter sounds, we also learn about uppercase and lower case letters in this book, which they have to circle/underline/color, depending on the instructions.

Then we have our Little Phonics book ("Teacher, blue book?" is what they say). I absolutely hate this book. This book is entirely too difficult for them, which frustrates me when they stop listening because they don't know what's going on. Like I said before, the kids have to complete their work every day, very important, and if they don't do it, or if they spell something wrong and I miss it, I get in trouble. Anyway, this book deals a lot with spelling, simply things like"hen, pen, jam, ram, jet, net" three letter words. There is a lot of fill in the blanks, and spelling, and they are simply too young to put two-and-two together in their tiny little brains. This would be a typical class conversation with one of our activities:

Me - "Ok Miffy Class, the word "pen" does it end with "en" or "et"?"
Class - "et!!!!"
Me - "What?? "pen" ends with "et" it sounds like "pet"???"
Class - "Noooo!"
Me - "Ok then what is it, "en" or "et"?
Class - "et!!!"
Me - "pet?!?, this word is pet?"
Class - "nooo, teacher! "en"!!!!
Me - Ok, so how to you spell "pen"? p-p-p-pen"
Class - "b"
Me - "B??"
Class - "nooo, P!!!"
Me - "Ok, P, what comes next? p-en, p-en"
Class "A? T? E?"
Me - Yes! E! Ok what next? Pen-n-n-n"
Class "e-t?"

And that's about when I go crazy. Luckily I have a few good spellers, and Becky has at least gotten the bright idea to look at the spelling in her book and yell it out loud. And then we have pages like this one, where they can't understand i->ig->wig-> they first don't know how to spell wig, and then don't understand that on the exact line below it (where there is still the picture of the wig!) that you should write the same thing as above. So instead of the page coming out somehting like this:
i->ig->wig
i->ig->wig
i->ig->pig
i->ig->pig
i->in->pin
i->in->pin
i->in->fin
i->in->fin
Sally will write something like this:
i->ig->wig
i->ig->wig
i->ig->wig
i->ig->wig
i->in->wig
i->in->wig
i->in->wig
i->in->wig
So I definitely have to help them step by step, letter by letter. And a lot of them still can't write the whole alphabet, since they kept adding kids to my class halfway through the term when we already learned the alphabet but I don't have time to go back.

We also have a math book. This one is hit or miss, sometimes the work is too hard, but right now, we're simply working on counting and writing our numbers, so the kids do it pretty fast. But when we have to match up, or color patterns then they get confused and I have to show them step by step (which of course takes more time). And finally we have a reading book that we do, we get a new one every two weeks. I don't really know if my kids are reading, or if they are just memorizing what I say. The books are a little advanced for them, things like "I see the elephant, it looks big." I'm pretty sure I couldn't read that when I was five, and that was in my native language. I think most of the girls are actually learning how to read, but the boys, ugh. Thomas is doing ok, but I think he's memorizing, Daniel is doing a lot better than before, but John, oh jeez. Seriously, this is how he read the sentence about the elephant "I the the elephant e the big" not even being sarcastic, and every time I tell him what the words are, he just doesn't seem to be picking it up.

I try to get the kids as entertained as possibly, purposely writing or saying the wrong answer so they can correct me, having them yell out answers, having tables compete, volunteering to help teacher, playing games, but some days all I have time for is book work, especially days where everyone is misbehaving and not paying attention to me. But that's a whole 'nother blog!

So there you have it, my morning schedule with the class (in the afternoon we do something like science or art or practice our performance). We have to do about 7-8 work book pages, plus attempt to go through our reading book, all in the span of about 2 1/2 hours. Plus, I'm supposed to find time for them to have play time, but a lot of times they take to long in their books and we don't have time. I really wish they had more time to get out and have fun, I feel like they would be a lot less restless in class, but here in Korea, it's all work and no play, even when you're five!