first lesson

Quick update because I'm still borrowing my roommates internet USB thing.  Hopefully I'll get mine on Monday after I get my ARC card.

On Thursday I got to teach a lesson to the kids who were in summer camp this week at my school.  There were only 13 of them so it was a great way to ease my way into this.  I taught a small lesson on transportation.  I found some incredible vocabulary cards at a local bookstore with a picture of the item on one side and then the English and Chinese word on the other.  There were all different forms of transportation so I picked out 13, one for each kid, showed them the picture, had them read the Chinese word, and then told them the English word.  We went through them all, reviewing as a group the English words, and then played two games.  For the first one I had written all of the words on huge index cards so they had to pick an index card and match the word to the correct picture (bicycle, car, garbage truck, airplane, etc).  Then I used my bananagrams (Thanks Smola family!).  I dumped out all the letters and each kid had to take a turn finding the right letters to match the picture and spell out the word.  They absolutely loved doing it!  Their favorites were jet and school bus, and the difficult ones for them were fire engine and ambulance.  It was a little difficult to keep them all calmed down becuase they were so excited they kept creeping up on me and the cards.  I had to keep saying "back, back, back" and motioning with my hands.  For some reason they LOVED that and kept singing the rest of the time "back,back, back, back..." except they didn't pronounce the ck very hard so they were just saying "ba..ba...ba" hahaha  it was cute.  The lesson went very well except for this one troublesome class clown who said "F*** you."  LOL, i honestly don't think he had any clue what he was saying, but did know it was something not good becuase when I looked at him his face was all guilty.  I motioned for him to come over to me and made him sit right by me the rest of the time.  I told him he could not say that it was very bad, but who knows if he understood me.  I think he knew he was in trouble so that's good enough.  After he sat quietly for awhile he said "teacher?"  When I turned around he said "face is beautiful"  hahahaha

I got to see my classroom on Thursday too.  It's kind of dirty and a mess right now but I'm gonna work on it all next week.  I have a SmartBoard!!!  It's all in Chinese but whatever, it's a SmartBoard, I'll figure it out =)  And I have endless manipulatives.  There are drawers and drawers and boxes of flashcards and posters with English vocabulary words.  The computer has a ton of files with songs, videos, and interactive games.  AND, I have a co-teacher in every class with me.  This school is already providing me with so many more materials than I'm used to.  It's amazing.

That's about it for now.  I borrowed a bike from one of Cassandra's teachers and her school bought her one.  Our friend Jackie is in the same county and just got a scooter so she's going to ride over here toward us and meet us at McDonalds, haha, it's the easiest place to find around here.  Then we'll ride around and explore the city.  Hopefully we don't get lost because these streets are insane.  It's not a nice grid of north and south, east and west like at home.  They go every which way.