November 2nd

Today was quite busy and fun, teaching at the school. We woke up early and taught an Upper Kindergarten class, with ten five year olds. They were all very sweet and precious. We wanted to have them speaking English as much as we could. We started off with having everyone introduce themselves. Most started off very quiet and shy. We then read a Curious George book and asked them questions as we went along. They got less shy and were soon pointing out colors in the story, answering questions, and telling us their favorite colors. We asked questions and tried having them arrange the words to make an sentence to answer, but they are quite young so it was hard. Our main goal was to just concentrate on having them talking as much as possible. We acted out different parts of the story as we read and had them act out the whole story at the end as well. They were so cute! We did hand motions like "up" and "down", "push" and "pull", "good monkey" (thumbs up) and "bad monkey" (thumbs down). They really liked that part.

Most of the talking was just repeating what we said though, which we want to try to break, and have them think for themselves. After having them repeat a sentence like "George is a good monkey", if I said "good job!" to praise their efforts, they repeated "good job!" after me. It was pretty funny. When I told them "say dump truck", they replied "say dump truck!" So their repetition skills are good, comprehension not quite as good! They were good at pointing out different colors though, finding the monkey in the picture, and telling me which color sticker they wanted at the end :)

We took three groups of this kindergarten class today. We're glad we broke it up into groups of only 10-15 kids, to get more talking and acting in, with individual attention. We ended off with a heads, shoulders, knees and toes dance for some of the classes, which they liked. They're smart and know the body parts in English, and once they figured it out, loved the dancing and moving around! Its amazing how quickly they go from being shy and only whispering to having tons of energy and jumping around. So cute!

The rest of the day was calm, full of great meals, resting, and writing. People were coming in and out of the house all day as usual. We love sitting on her front steps and watching all the activity in the evening- the last few kids leaving, the teachers grading papers, the constant stream of family members coming and going, always getting coffee and snacks. It's a very fun place to be! We wrote tons of postcards today. Chandra gave us extra postcards, from places we've never even been too, so you might get one of those.




Shout out to Paige's Grandma and her Uncle Dud...what are your addresses? Can't post these postcards without them...