I teach everyday, Monday through Friday from 8:30am to 11:30am. The first two hours are spent with kindergarteners and the last hour with first graders. The other five English teachers and I each have a home group that consists of 5-6 students. We all do opening exercises together and then split up to do a twenty minute lesson with our home group. We rotate home groups and repeat our lesson three more times. We do the same thing with the first graders but we just do one lesson and we don’t rotate. Thus we only need to plan one lesson a day but we teach it five times. On top of this we also teach another 1-2 hours in the afternoon each week with the other grades (we call this ELE). Each grade gets one hour with us each week where we plan a simple, fun activity and they get to listen to a naïve speaker.
Teaching Schedule:
8:30am – Opening exercises with Kindergarteners.
8:40-9:05 – First rotation with home group. My students are Roxy, Ben, Jacob, Andrew, and Ben.
9:05-9:30 – Second rotation. The students are Harry, Ron, Dean, Sean, Skyler, and Tyler.
9:30- 9:55 – Third rotation. The students are Jared, Ginny, Amber, Kyle, Andrew, and Rick.
9:55-10:20 – Fourth rotation. The students are Olivia, Tim, Tommy, Jordan, Lindsey, and Elaine.
10:20-10:30 – Store (where the kids get prizes for speaking English) with home group.
10:40-10:45 – Opening exercises with first graders.
10:45-11:15 – Lesson with first graders.
11:15-11:25 – Store.
Times for ELE differs, but they are all in the afternoon.
My home group kindergarteners: Jacob, Andrew, Ben, Gabe, and Roxy. Because we spend the most time with our home groups—we know them the best and are most attached to them.
My first graders: Jackson, Gale, Lane, Peeta, Logan, Luke, Kirk, and Rory. Whenever there are new kids to the English program, we get to give them English names. My friend named hers first and stole all the Harry Potter names: Harry, Ron, Dean, Neville, Luna, Ginny, Fred, George, Malfoy, Albus, Dennis, Pansy, etc. So obviously I had to name my kids after Hunger Games and Gilmore Girls. Since these kids keep these names throughout their lives, we decided Hermonie and Katniss were too weird for English names—although I feel like Malfoy and Albus was pushing it…
OH. My gosh. So cute. Also, I am seriously cracking up about the names. You told me that before, but seeing a little Asian boy there with the name "Kirk" on him is hilarious. Also, when I saw Lane, I was like "YES! Perfect." It's perfect. Ah.
ReplyDeleteGILMORE GIRLS NAMES. I LOVE IT SO MUCH.
ReplyDeleteOh, wow. Either Chinese kids are harder than I thought to differentiate at first... or they're really bad at communicating what their names are. Three of the four first graders that I know are by different names... And two or three of the kindergartners have been changed. The biggest issue with that as teachers is trying to figure out who you're talking about when you say who you have in rotations. I've got Suzie, Demetri, John, Edward, Amber, a new little boy named Andrew and a new little boy named Jimmy in my home group. I do teach Ben, though.
ReplyDeleteAnd we noticed the Harry Potter fascination, but not the Gilmore Girls and Hunger Games. Although that could be because I think the only one who still has the same name is Peeta. I'm not sure about Logan, and I don't think Rory is here anymore. And it makes so much more sense now why when Lane wrote her name she wrote it as "Lame." For some reason we thought her name was Nate, though... I'm not quite sure how that happened, but I'll be sure to ask about it tomorrow!