Sunday, April 4, 2010

Crazy Hair Day and Preschool Art Class


Here is Boston Class. All our classroom names are named after world cities. These are 7 year olds (5-6 international age) who have studied at our school since age 5. Therefore, they are starting their 3rd year of preschool with complete English immersion. Their English skills amaze me some days. I teach them once a week for their art class. I am one of the 7 year old art teachers. Just to give you an idea of their English skills, we had an art assignment that was to draw a construction site. I asked the kids to name some construction equipment. All of a sudden, all hands were in the air, shouting out answers like "bulldozer!" "dump truck!" "crane!" and most impressive of all was "CONCRETE MIXER!!!". My other classes were lucky to get "truck" and "block".

Art usually consists of a drawing/ coloring component and then some sort of project. The project usually being too complicated for most of the kids, meaning Teacher makes 10 projects for the students.

This particular week was draw "line up!" aka, lets think of where we line up in the community and at school and draw a picture. Kind of lame, but whatever. The project was much more fun, and totally do-able for the kids. Making Easter eggs. While the manual said to use hard boiled eggs... any preschool teacher is smart enough to see the dangers in letting ten 7 year olds loose with hard boiled eggs. So, fortunately, someone from corporate was wise enough to send all the schools some styrofoam eggs. The kids got to color these up with markers and decorate them with stickers. Then they put them into little cups with fake Easter grass.


I brought my camera to class this particular day because, not only was it Easter egg making day, but this day was also "Crazy Hair Day". All the kids wore their hair in interesting styles, and a lot of the girls dressed up too.

I'm not quite sure what this one has in her mouth. I guess that makes me a bad teacher...


Here's Jong Ho and Yu Chan. Jong Ho (the one with the pointy hair) has incredible English skills. He has no accent and the mistakes he makes sound more like the mistakes a preschooler in America would make, not a Korean preschooler's mistakes. Yu Chan also has excellent English skills. I'm guessing from hanging around Jong Ho so much.

Anyway, Art class can stress me out some days. dealing with 7-10 preschoolers at once can be trying on a good day. Not to mention, I've just never connected with this age group. And it's every day from 1:40-2:30. There's no days without it. Anyway, three of the 5 classes I teach are great kids. The other two... well... the teachers are trying to make them better classes... hopefully they'll get better, not worse as the year progresses....

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