I guess it’s about time that I write another blog, right? It’s been a bit since my last post, and that is mostly due to the fact that nothing that interesting has happened. My class of 7 year old students graduated, and no tears were shed on either end. I think we had a love hate relationship, and neither was sad to see the other one go. However, I do see them still around school, and we are both always excited to see each other now, after the fact.
My new class is also known as Kiwi class, but now they are 5 year old little babies. Seriously. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, when Korean children are born they are seen as one year old. So the students in my “5 year old class” are actually four years old. But in fact they are all turning 4 this year, so in reality they are all 3 years old- hence, babies.
Although I have taught 5 year old students before, it was never from the beginning (my first job I taught 5’s but they were already 6 months into school). I like to believe that I’m doing an okay job with them so far, but I am SOO exhausted by the end of the day. I seriously feel like a mom to 10 children, who don’t speak English. They are learning very quickly, starting to understand what “school” is, and I can see great potential in all of them (well most of them).
We have begun the year learning simple phrases, counting numbers and beginning to identify letters and colors. A lot of the students come in with a basic understanding of English, which makes the first few lessons easy. Google has become my best friend, and I never really thought I would be googling “easy art ideas for preschoolers”, but that is my life at the moment. I’d also like to point out that there are NO easy art ideas for preschoolers. Anything ‘easy’ means that I have to do at least an hour of prep work of cutting things out for them, so they have it easy to glue. Eventually, they will start to be able to use scissors themselves.
I was so happy to learn that I would be teaching 5 year olds. I kept on having dreams about teaching them, and I had a feeling it was going to happy for me. I love being able to be silly, creative, artistic and not as serious with a class. With my 7 year old students, it was a lot of work for them which created stress in the classroom- something I am not a fan of.
We just had our first birthday in class, so naturally, we had a birthday party at school. The parent of the birthday child provides a cake, fruit, juice and other snacks for us to have a small party. Each kid in the class buys a present that the birthday child gets to open. And of course, a camera man comes in and takes about 100 photos of the event. It’s really fun and I get just as excited as the students do about it. So just to clarify, this girl has just turned 4 years old, and she’s the oldest one in the class.
Overall, I’m very happy with my new situation at school. Happy enough to stay for the school year, which means I’ll be here until March. My kids are adorable, fun and happy. I had a few criers at the beginning of March, but they have all started to settle into our lifestyle from 9:30-3. I’m looking forward to being able to communicate with them better, and really bonding with them. New Kiwi class is already better than old Kiwi class, no offense old kiwi class.
