White Seoul

Yesterday, I had some friends over for Domino’s Pizza (so much better then home), ice cream bars and raspberry wine (a specialty of Korea, I guess) and on there way out they noticed the snow. We were all very excited to see the snow but had no idea it was going to snow all through the night and early this morning. When I woke up this morning I was shocked to see the snow falling out my window. Anxious to leave and enjoy my walk to school in the snow, I absentmindedly paid no attention to my footing and the first step out of my building I slipped and fell right on my bum/hip. This put a little damper on my mood but I cheered up seeing a beautiful white Seoul. I can’t believe its March and we are still able to get about three inches of snow, that’s just crazy!

School today was much more successful then the past two days. On Monday I worked with the kids on the concept inside and outside and it was such a stress getting them to understand and apply it to their worksheets. The math books I was given to use with the kids have these brief stories which are supposed to briefly cover/teach the students the lesson at hand. However, after the experience I had reading the story to the kids I don’t think I will be reading any of the other ones. They are just ridiculously stupid and the kids simply cannot make sense of it nor understand it really. Doing my best to explain and go through the worksheets with the students telling them exactly what they need to do, the students simply were not responding. It was as if I had spoken to a wall the whole time. Determined to get the students to understand the difference between inside and outside I came up with some more interactive activities for the next math day.

Today was the day I executed my inside and outside activates and I believe that each of the students finally grasped the concept. I gave each of the student’s five pieces of play fruit in a cup and we took them out of the cup, placed some inside left some outside and so on. After the fruit cup activity I had all the students step into the pre-taped circle on the floor and then would send various kids to different parts of the room and ask if they were inside or outside. Finally, I finished with one last worksheet where they had to circle the bear outside of the tent and mark on x on the bear inside the tent. Feeling better about how I executed the lesson, I was assured by Alison after work that while I was doing the inside, outside activities with Oak class my Cedar class, these are my homeroom students, were shouting out the answers during Alison’s class. (Alison and I have adjoining rooms with a removable wall so we hear each other teach often.) This made me happy and if my Cedar class understood the difference I gather the other classes did too. Everyday my Cedar students are slowly showing progress towards responding to the English language, which excites me.